


raise a cup

by Makari Crow (Beanna)



Series: Thy word is a lamp [1]
Category: Fate/Grand Order
Genre: M/M, Unresolved Emotional Tension, does it count as pining if you don't know you're doing it?, onesided clueless pining Merlin/Romani, sort-of a fixit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-19 12:40:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 25,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20657405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beanna/pseuds/Makari%20Crow
Summary: Merlin is these three things:boredfed up with tragic self-sacrificea liar, most of all to himselfWe all of us leave traces in the world where we don't expect to, and Merlin has all the time in the world to find them. And also to not cope with the emotions he definitely doesn't have. But, you know, you don't listen to a person pour their heart out to you for months without getting alittleattached.It's fine. This is fine.





	1. idle hands

**Author's Note:**

  * For [purplejabberwock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/purplejabberwock/gifts).

> Fair warning I play a little fast and loose with Fate/ canon. It is what it is. 
> 
> Violence warning is just in case; there's a few explicit descriptions of injuries.
> 
> For Pur, who spoke sweet words and didn't let me stop.

> Pour the wine and raise a cup
> 
> Drink up, brothers, you know how
> 
> And spill a drop for Orpheus
> 
> Wherever he is now…

—”We Raise Our Cups,” _Hadestown_

**[16:43:42] magimoonshine47: **hey, has anyone heard from romance?  
**[16:44:04] magimoonshine47:** it's just, everyone else i know is fine even though i guess it's 2019 now...  
**[16:44:32] magimoonshine47:** but i used to see that guy everywhere, all the time, and it says he hasn't posted in  
**[16:44:35] magimoonshine47:** uh  
**[16:45:12] magimoonshine47:** like, a couple of weeks now.

**[16:47:32] mariHEARTluvr:** ...o sh*t good point i havn't seen him either  
**[16:48:22] mariHEARTluvr:** u mean @archromance, rite?  
**[16:49:48] mariHEARTluvr: **what if sumthing happend 2 him?

**[16:53:21] magimoonshine47: **... maybe he's got too much to do at work?

The conversation really did start organically, although Merlin may be guilty of nudging it a little. Well, it’s his website, after all, even if most people consider it Magi*Mari’s; he has every right, doesn’t he? Merlin watches people talk, mildly worried speculation scrolling down the screen with no further intervention necessary, and he draws a knee up to rest his chin on it, smiling to himself.

This is a start: this is a truth. The man is not forgotten.

Here, a small assortment of humans with the barest of magic potential discuss the missing member of their cadre, one Romani Archaman, even if most of them don’t know him by that name. Here, the thought of the man is a living thing, even if only a whisper of it: quicksilver impressions of someone who had skated through a hundred hundred lives, touching down here and there to dispense words of enthusiasm or to correct a point of trivia.

As a tactic, it makes up in volume what it lacks in precision.

Merlin casts his net wide, dips in and out of daydreams. Every time he settles back in his solid body and his solid tower, his hands are a little more full of starstuff, fuzzy twinkles like the tiniest of fairy lights caught in cotton candy. These ephemeralities are the easiest to gather, passing thoughts of people who don't know to look for a trespasser, even one as lightfooted as he is.

The rest is going to take a little while longer.

A few of the staff at Chaldea are Magi*Mari fans, too, and that isn’t an accident by any stretch of the imagination. Merlin treads gently here, borrowing impressions of the good Doctor and his gloved hands gesturing animatedly as he talks about cuteness and positivity and Magi*Mari's charm points. Merlin's pretty much flattered, even if he already knows he did a good job designing his adorable alter ego. Humans still surprise him, every now and then.

In a few hours, or when his hands are full, or both, Merlin pushes back from the array of flowers that mimic a computer, tossing what he's gathered of dreams into the air to watch it sparkle and spin. Here a thought of green eyes, there a passing notion on how weird it is he wears gloves all the time. It's a start.

—It's a start with nowhere to put it except in one of the trees, and _that_ might have interesting consequences. Oops. Merlin tucks the fragile recollections into the crook of one arm and beckons to the laptop with his other hand. The screen projects more properly, visible from here.

Time to beg a favor from Leonardo da Vinci. He sketches flicker-quick letters in the air instead of bothering to type, humming absently at bundled memories while he does.

...email is probably less suspicious than Chaldea's intranet, right? Right.

**from:** marinette.sage@mmail.com  
**to:** ldv@chaldea.org  
**subject:** potential singularity!  
**importance: **high **[!]**  


hey! now that i have your attention

can i borrow a coffin? you've got plenty, right?  


**from:** ldv@chaldea.org****  
to: marinette.sage@mmail.com****  
subject: re: potential singularity!

You most certainly may not! How did you get this address?

**from:** marinette.sage@mmail.com  
**to:** ldv@chaldea.org  
**subject:** re: re: potential singularity!

pleaaaaaase? i only need it for three months, tops. Ritsuka's the only one using them right now, you could lock one off for me. i wouldn't be asking if it wasn't important.

There is a long, long pause, while Merlin ponders how risky it would be to go ahead anyway. The thing about the coffins is – they're integrally linked to the leyshift mechanisms, which means they're _designed_ to recall people who have been flung far and wide. Chaldea verifies the existence of its Master every minute she is gone. And Romani Archaman has leyshifted before – somewhere, Chaldea knows how he is put together. In short, there's really no better way to re-verify his existence.

It would just be very messy and a waste of a lot of hard work if someone tried to use the same coffin Merlin was using, so he's trying to head that off at the pass. Why isn't Da Vinci answering? –Oh, she's trying to trace the email domain. In retrospect, Merlin supposes he should have identified himself somehow, before slipping into a reasonably secret inbox.

Oh well. Look, she's answering him anyway. If he can _actually access_ Chaldea's systems, he is free to make use of one of the Klein coffins. Coffin 4, if he pleases. Fourth from the left, not from the right. Merlin can see the face she's making from here, and it's well worth the extra trouble. He'll call that bluff, thank you, and see how she takes it. “Home you go,” he says, tapping his collection of romance and remembrances till it chimes with the memory of a laugh. “One, two, and...”

_Three_ goes unsaid as Merlin condenses all his focus, out of all the dreams and sights he sees, and into one narrow channel aimed straight at Chaldea. There: the boxy coffin, the soft-glowing panels around it. Here: the tower room, the abundance of flowers, the rich magical force that fills every circuit in Avalon to brimming. There: Caster, Leonardo Da Vinci, bending over Coffin 4, gauntlet tap-tap-tapping against the side. Here: Grand Caster, Merlin, sending a nascent present home, holding the bridge between the disparate magical circuits until all is settled.

Just like transplanting a sprout.

There: Da Vinci, eyes wide for a moment before she sighs thoughtfully and checks the monitors.

Merlin watches long enough to see that she has slapped a bright yellow _Out of Order_ sign on the coffin and locked it firmly before he withdraws. That'll do.

Da Vinci emails him a minute or two later, this time with an invitation to Chaldea's intranet messenger, as if he couldn't have done it himself. Well, it's the thought that counts!  


**ldavinci started a private message!**

**ldavinci:** So! Are you going to explain to me why Coffin 4 has decided to smell like nostalgia and oxidizing copper?  
**ldavinci:** Not that I don't have my own ideas already, but if you'd like to make a good impression, I am graciously allowing you this second chance!

**sagerose: **hahaha, is that what it smells like? i'm not clairsentant.

**ldavinci: **You’re not very helpful, either. And will you keep your pseudonyms straight?

**sagerose:** not a chance. anyway, it's a present! happy birthday!  


**ldavinci:** It's still January, you know.  


**sagerose:** that's why you can't unwrap it yet. i'm still working on it, okay? you have to promise not to peek! ☆  


Merlin peeks. Da Vinci is trying to pretend she's not smiling. She _is_ muttering something about unicode standards.  


**ldavinci:** Can I help?  


It's less fun when she's not arguing with him. And when it comes to details beyond the surface-level impressions, the puddled footsteps left behind– Da Vinci is going to be, quite honestly, one of his best modern sources. An artist, who has always had a sharp eye for the realities of the things she sees; a Caster, the best magical adept at Chaldea Merlin can ask for.

Someone who has worked beside Romani, so closely the shadows behind them were shared.  


**sagerose:** i'll visit you later, okay?  


**ldavinci: **Knock first!  


He leaves it at that, and waits for her to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * To avoid any confusion: I prefer 'leyshift' to 'rayshift' since two reasons: a, one of the wikis supports it as a valid translation, and b, they're literally hooking into ley-line power. leyshift makes a lot more sense to me.


	2. renaissance man

Since, as a Servant, Da Vinci doesn't really need to sleep, either she's reducing the amount of magical energy she consumes or she's purposefully waiting for him. Merlin wanders through twisty Italian streets that can't seem to decide if they’re fifteenth century or twentieth – though in some cases the architecture stays exactly the same, only weathers and bends. He leaves vines flowering as he passes, determined sprigs shoving their way up through cobbles or cracked pavement with all the irresistible force of growth.

Da Vinci's workshop bears much in common with Chaldea's laboratory, he thinks, except that the door is solid wooden. It sprouts a single hopeful green tendril where Merlin taps his knuckles against it. “There, there,” Merlin says to it.

“Come in!” Da Vinci calls from inside. The door swings open, revealing her wrist-deep in something clockwork and glittering.

Merlin slips past it, eyes that sprouting leaf. “You know,” he says, “you can be a tree if you want to. You always were, weren’t you?”

“Stop flirting with my door!” Da Vinci hollers, but it's too late; her door has remembered the cypress it was, or could have been, evergreen and just a little prickly and overflowing with fat, rounded cones.

“It's not my fault,” Merlin protests, moving out of the way as the tree explores what real estate it now has open to it. “I just made it aware of its options.”

She wrinkles her nose at him over the unseated bones of her project. Her form in Chaldea is solid, as good an approximation of human as any Heroic Spirit puts on; here she wavers just a little, the shape of her face unsolid just enough to be a mystery. “You are not here to discuss the liberation of trees,” she informs him. “Tree suffrage can be discussed at a later date!”

“Cover your berries,” Merlin tells her ex-front-door. “You don't need to hear this terrible, dismissive speech–”

Da Vinci gently withdraws her hands from metal and precious stones, and just as gently pitches a thumbnail-sized ruby at his head. “_Rude_,” Merlin says, affronted, as he ducks to the side. It's not that he doesn't deserve it, because he probably does; it's just that it's rude. Even in a dream.

The automaton she's been tinkering with has the shape of a bird. No surprises there, really. Da Vinci had hardly been the first person to look skyward and dream of what could be, if only too, too solid flesh could leave the earth and ascend, but she might have managed it, given more time. Merlin's seen her dreams before, full of the inventions and understandings so tirelessly sought when waking, and a hundred hundred possibilities more besides.

This bird will have feathers, not rotors. Blades like primaries, thick-shafted and oil-sheened, rustle against each other in an unfelt wind and make a sound like rushing water. 

“You know,” Da Vinci says, bending over it again. Her hair falls forward – slips back behind her shoulders again, girded by a loose ribbon. “I don't normally sleep this much. Sometimes, when I was alive, I only bothered with naps.”

“Hmmmmm.” Merlin draws the note out, and comes over to prop his elbows on her worktable, chin in his hands as he leans forward. “Are you saying I should be honored you took so much valuable time out of your day, Da Vinci-_chan_?”

“Yes,” she says, deft hands cupping a gem that throbs softly with electric current. She eases it into a sturdy copper cradle and sighs with delight. “Be honored! Also, explain yourself, please.”

Merlin considers it. The tree expands behind him, one burly root tapping at his knee as he thinks. Absently he settles into the provided seat without bothering to move his elbows. Well, he really _does_ want her help, after all. She's the one in the world, in the physical space of Chaldea. There'll be time for the pointless sort of bickering later.

In the spirit of cooperation, he dials down the cryptic. “Is it not said that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?”

“I think the coffin you've leased is doing a little more than speaking.” Da Vinci prods something, and the great wing-blades flex. “Ah! Yes. Are you going to make me guess?” She withdraws her hands from the automaton again. Bare, of course, for the detailed work; but her gloves fade in seemingly without her notice as she turns to sort through an overflowing cabinet.

“Genius mage and artist, Leonardo da Vinci, would I make you guess?” He would, actually; but his point is that he highly doubts that she will be _guessing_. She is too sharp for that, both in intelligence and wisdom.

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” she says into the cabinet, over a noise of clattering metal like windchimes. Merlin can fill in for himself the corollary: _but keep doing it anyway_.

There is wire looped over her arm and further feather-blades in her gloved hand when she comes back. She nudges a few arcane instruments out of the way to put them down; one of the shifted things grows gold-spoked legs and spiders over toward Merlin, uneven but with growing confidence. Lazily he puts out a hand for it.

“You said it smelled like nostalgia.” The little construct is some kind of dream-creature, Merlin discovers, as he straightens up and brings it up to eye level. It's all gears and angles that shouldn't possibly work, little pinprick-feet only just digging into his palm. Iridescence sheens over its gold body, making any one stillness impossible.

“And oxidizing copper,” Da Vinci confirms. Her gloves have vanished again. She's feathering the wings more thoroughly now, flexing and relaxing them this way and that as she seats secondary feathers. “Nostalgia, in this case, is precisely the aftershave Romani liked.” A thoughtful pause; another feather. “Likes. I have a very good memory, and I'm sure it's that. Which leads me to conclude that you are hiding something of his in that coffin. And the coffins, as I'm sure you're aware, are not just convenient receptacles! They are designed for a purpose. Therefore, I propose that you intend to make use of that purpose to reconstruct and leyshift one Romani Archaman back from–”

Only there does she falter, clever hands finally quiet just for these few moments. “What I can't figure out yet,” she says softly, “is how you intend to acquire him. That Singularity, the Temple of Time, is gone. Not even atoms remain. I checked. And even if pop culture and religious texts are trying to hold on to him, King Solomon has erased himself from the Throne of Heroes.” She does not have to tell him that she had checked this, too. Of course she had: Da Vinci would have explored all the options.

Fortunately for everyone involved, Merlin has more options available than she does. “He has,” Merlin agrees cheerfully. “He did a terribly good job of abdicating, too, but _Romani Archaman_ didn't. How many of your staff there knew and respected him? How many Servants met him, or heard his voice?”

“–not enough to create a Heroic Spirit,” Da Vinci says, but her focus is completely off the automaton now, and her clever mind is ticking. “A Phantom Spirit, maybe, at the very outside... but you don't mean to summon him the normal way. You're just looking for his Spirit Origin, aren't you?”

Merlin tickles the top of the strange little creature in his palm. Da Vinci gives it a meaningful look, and abruptly the metallic joins that didn't make sense before do now, and what Merlin is holding is a shining, airy beetle. “Aw,” he says, half disappointed, though her mastery is nearly worth the disappointment to observe. “–something like that, anyway! So, I need another favor.”

Da Vinci does not appear surprised by this. “What's the favor?” she asks, thereby again demonstrating her wisdom.

“I need your memories of Romani,” Merlin says. The beetle flickers its jewel-case wings and lifts, whirring, from his palm; Merlin laces his fingers together again, and drops his chin back into his hands. Oh, right. “Please.”

“All of them?” she asks, with some suspicious reserve.

“Well,” he says, “Ideally. I need as much data as I can get, here, I'm working with chat servers and lunchroom conversations so far. You know him best, don't you? You knew who he was before anyone else did.”

Even David, though that Servant, too, has opted to spend some time within Chaldea, hadn't known. Merlin will visit him too, one way or another– but might save him for last. There's going to be some kind of liquid, and Merlin honestly doesn't yet know what kind. It'll be an exciting surprise.

Da Vinci eyes Merlin a little longer before her expression clears, and she smiles sweetly at him. “As long as you're only copying,” she says. “This is a lending library, not a bookshop! And it wouldn't do you much good if all the people you need data points from then promptly forgot him, right?”

She has it. Merlin curves a thin blade of satisfaction with his mouth. “Just so,” he says. “Don't mind me, really! I'll just poke around a bit in the stacks and be on my way.”

“Then I shall supervise and shush you as appropriate,” she says with great relish, and pats her automaton-bird on the wing gently before moving around the worktable. “I set an alarm to allow for a full eight hours of sleep, so there's plenty of time.”

By some stories, Leonardo da Vinci only slept twenty minutes at a time, every four hours, and only needed two hours of sleep in sum total per day. Merlin doubts it a little, but there's at least one bullet-point listicle that's gone viral, so chances are Da Vinci, here, does something similar.

“Honored by your sacrifices,” he says brightly, smiling up at her as she comes around.

“Yes,” she says, and, “Thank you, let's go find Romani, now.”

Da Vinci walks like a woman who knows where she is going, and before her the streets of Renaissance Italy become a straightforward path onward, not the winding nest of jamais-vu imaginings Merlin had picked his way through to find her dreams. Cobbles become more uniform bricks become something sleeker and metallic, ringing muted thuds under Merlin's feet and brighter chimes for Da Vinci's.

He knows what Chaldea looks like very well, even if he's never been there himself. Physically.

“So!” she says as they go deeper, toward ... something. The aesthetics are correct, but the geography is, Merlin is almost certain, much more labyrinthine than the actual thing. “Have you considered if it is possible to form a contract with Ritsuka that will allow for your summoning? I'm sure Babylonia wasn't a fluke, even if humanity has been proven to exist again.”

“There are very specific conditions on my tower,” Merlin says. His cheer is very believable, he feels, because he is cheerful all the time; and who's to say he hasn't resigned himself to that fate, really? “I'm sure I can come up with something, but other projects come first. And speaking of those other projects–”

He stops talking, reaching out as Da Vinci is about to palm open an electronically-locked door. She pauses with her glove fluctuating in and out of existence, considering Merlin. He doesn't quite catch her shoulder, offers a smile instead. “Keep it a surprise, will you?” he says. “If people's hopes rise and smash, it'll be messy.” There will be tears. Someone will probably try to summon Merlin purely to throttle him, which is not, amazingly, an anomalous reaction. 

“I don't see how you're going to do that,” she says, and goes ahead anyway, opens the door and gestures Merlin inside. “If this is how you're doing things, Ritsuka and Mash are going to be your next-best sources.”

“So they are,” Merlin says vaguely. She's missed the part where he doesn't really feel like he needs to talk to them up front – the only reason he did with Da Vinci, in fact, is because he needed a line of communication with waking clarity to extract a promise she'd leave the gestating coffin alone.

Without mentioning this, Merlin ambles into the room. It wasn't labeled as medical, but it sure looks like it now he’s inside. Ghosts of Dr. Roman and Da Vinci flicker here and there, over a monitor in the far corner or perched on one of the hard beds or bickering with gestures too exaggerated to be truly serious. “Most of him should be in here somewhere,” Da Vinci says. She's eying a ghostly version of Romani who has a strawberry shortcake and looks just a forkful shy of guilty about it.

Merlin studies the same. Is that fear of indulgence, fear of loss of his prize, or fear of being caught slacking off? Honestly, he can't say; and when he ambles over to the memory, passes his hands through the cake, through the growing ginger cascade of Romani's hair, all he gets are Da Vinci's impressions, some tolerant fondness and a warm mental note that he can be bribed or rewarded with strawberries and cake.

It's sweet. Merlin comes away with palmfuls of soft, malleable feelings, cotton-candy affection clouding in his cupped hands, the lights of considerate memories stretched between his fingers. “What _is_ that?” Da Vinci asks, leaning around his shoulder to tap with a gentle finger of her own.

There's a resonance, a chime that resonates the scent of strawberries. Her eyes go briefly wide.

“Everything,” Merlin says. If anyone could understand the metaphysics surely Da Vinci would be among them, but he's here for a reason, and also he doesn’t really _want_ to explain.

“Hmmm,” she says in a voice of deep doubt. “I'll keep watching you, then.”

Merlin keeps working, Da Vinci now following at his shoulder. From somewhere she produces glasses with multicolored lenses, flicks different filters in front of them as Merlin catches up the essence of dreams and the bonds between people. Here is Romani as a young man, fresh out of his schooling and newly assigned to Chaldea –- he had shorter hair then, curling faintly around his jaw and making him look even younger.

King Solomon ascended his throne at the age of fifteen, they say. The chosen of God, the wisest of kings. Looking at the image of the young man, colored soft around the edges with the fuzziness of dreams and the fond nostalgia of Da Vinci herself, Merlin sees the prison it is, and his own mistakes in echoing mirror.

–none of _that_. Firmly Merlin puts it out of his mind. He's very good at not thinking about that. He might go so far as to call it a talent, in fact. And it's not what he's here for.

Late nights in Chaldea's control room. Sleep-deprived conversations, where Romani is less circumspect than he meant to be. Speaking with Da Vinci of romance and hope for humanity. Da Vinci loves him a little, Merlin thinks; not in the way of people who lie down together, but as friend and peer, as an artist loves the muse for beauty and pain both.

It's probably because he's in her dreams and in her memories that he can see her point. Merlin catches the shadow of these feelings out of the air – “I can _feel_ that,” Da Vinci says with some mild concern.

“Don't worry about it,” Merlin says brightly.

“It's exactly when you say that I think I ought to worry,” she says, but she doesn't look all that worried. Instead she leans in close. “Let me see that.”

“Carefully,” he says, as he'd rather not scatter everything he's collected and have to start again; but he supposes she does have the right to see what he's taking with him out of her spirit. The collection has stayed about the size of a human head, growing only denser instead of bigger, and the color tends to coppery, just shy of peach, which isn't much of a surprise. To the eye it looks like an oscillating cloud shot through with light, giving it an internal luminescence that pulses like a heartbeat.

Of course, to the touch, it's something more.

Da Vinci looks at it from different angles, with blue glass and red, touches only gently. “It's almost him,” she says, approvingly. “This is part of his Spirit Origin, isn't it? Or a waveform that approximates it in such a way that other samples will correct for any error. That's why the sensory feedback is so odd, it really _is_ a little bit of everything he is. I wouldn't have thought it was possible.”

“For anyone else, it wouldn't be.” Merlin beams self-satisfaction, tucking his gains into the crook of his arm again. Da Vinci looks almost disappointed. “I'll be back later if I'm missing something. Remember, keep Coffin 4 off-limits! I don't want to see what happens if someone opens it early.”

“I have very good locks,” Da Vinci promises, as proud and confident of her creations as he is of his. In this way they understand each other perfectly. “Ask if you have to come back! I'll arrange an extra nap.”

“Much obliged,” says Merlin, who has never been obliged to anyone in his life and doesn't intend to start now. He sweeps a courtly bow to her and turns to wake.

When he is awake in his tower, as ever there's the moment of disorientation at how close the walls seem, how narrow this space that is all his physical form has available. He adjusts, as ever; and this time his prize has come back with him, jangling softly in his arms.

Transplanting it to Chaldea is easier this time. There's a sort of gravity between the pieces there and the one he has now. They know they belong to each other, and they want to be part of a greater whole. Perhaps it's fanciful to say it's the draw of a spirit that wants to live, but Merlin's going to say it nevertheless.


	3. hopes for the future

Da Vinci messages him some hours after Merlin extricates himself from her dreams. Apparently she now assumes that she has permanent access to him via instant messenger. She might even be right.  
  


**ldavinci:** I slept for ten hours! Ten! Through the alarm! I’ve never slept that long in my existence! What did you do?

**sagerose:** oops.  
**sagerose: **would you believe it was an accident? 

**ldavinci:** ...Maybe. 

**sagerose:** ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯  


He knows why it happened, of course; part of what makes him so very good at dreamwalking is being a cambion. His magic has a few hilariously specific niches, one of which is keeping people asleep. Of course, if Da Vinci can't figure that out on her own, he's not going to bother explaining.  
  


**ldavinci:** I thought you might like to know that the coffin feels warmer, by the way. All systems are still within acceptable parameters. I'll let you know if that changes. 

**sagerose:** yes, thank you! that's perfect.  
**sagerose:** actually, i may need you to ask some servants to sleep for me.

**ldavinci:** ... David?

**sagerose:** eventually. not yet. anyone who's been hanging around Chaldea for a little while, though. long enough to know Romani a little. having memory references from spirits and humans should be more useful.

**ldavinci:** Understood!  
**ldavinci: **Caster, Cu Chulainn, was among the first after Mash to form a contract with Ritsuka. He will have had access to Chaldea for the longest span of time.

**sagerose:** oh, that guy.

**ldavinci:** Plenty of people would say the same about you. I'll look into the list further.  
**ldavinci:** Many of the Servants had an instinctive negative reaction to him, driven partially by his link to Goetia. It may affect your collections?

**sagerose:** nah, i know about that. i can account for it. and anyway, having all positive reactions would be silly! people are people, and by that virtue, there's always going to be people who dislike each other.  
**sagerose:** seriously, though, don't talk to David.

**ldavinci: **Oh, fine.

She doesn't say anything further there, though she stays online. Merlin expects that she'll answer if he does have anything more to ask.

For now, it's time to go dream-gathering again. A quick look reveals most of the people in Chaldea are still awake, and far too focused to daydream, so it's off to the Mage's Association. Merlin spends an annoying several hours stepping through the dreams of teachers, whispering of Romani Archaman and seeing whose dreams shift to match. Even sticking to those who were affiliated with the Animusphere family, it takes longer than he'd like to find which ones had Romani in their classes, and that's saying nothing of finding the non-magical medical school teachers.

_Someone_ had better appreciate all of the work he's doing here, is all he's saying on the topic. It takes so long he misses an entire Chaldean sleep cycle.

He does garner material there in England, at least, even if slimmer than preferred. There's still memory patterns. A prodigy, a cheerful boy who doesn't get out much. Someone who could probably stand to sleep more, judging by the shadows under his eyes and exactly how many coffee cups accumulated on his desks. All this Merlin bundles off to Coffin 4, and then takes a well-deserved break.

The break doesn't last long. Merlin gets bored, and completely junks his earlier plans to sneak into Ritsuka’s dreams when she’s not looking.  
  


**sagerose:** can you tell Ritsuka to take a nap?  
  


There's a pause of a few minutes.  
  


**ldavinci:** She says she's too excited to sleep now.  
  


Merlin goes to thump his head off the tower wall for some variety, though a few flower-vines intercede before he can actually hurt himself. When he goes to look at the computer again, Da Vinci has provided something more.  
  


**ldavinci:** The swing shift staff should be sleeping, though. Why don't you start there? She'll pass out once she's done some mock combat sessions, which I am suggesting right now.

**sagerose:** thank you~~~ ☆♡  
  


Spending time with the dreams of the staff of Chaldea is more agreeable than blunt force. Those few of them who are asleep right now know at least what he looks like, and he isn't exactly bothering to hide, to cloak himself in their dreams like he often would in more standard wanderings. One of the current sleepers lets him pass by in peace with only a little finger-wave; another greets him by name, cheerful, and pauses him for dream-logic small talk about mammalian fear responses as demonstrated in non-human monsters. It's kind of cute. Merlin spends a few minutes there before excusing himself to go look after the frogs, which is taken as completely sensible.

All of them knew Doctor Roman, of course. Some had to be patched up more than others, and anyone working on Chaldea's power systems had regular monitoring just in case of deleterious effects that hadn't been picked up on the first and second round of trials. Here Merlin fishes out bits of Doctor Roman’s know-how, cheeriness even over blood and bone and death – when the CMO is worried, everyone is worried. The good doctor keeps his calm over what's serious and panics over little things.

It's very human.

He almost wanders into Ritsuka's dreams without realizing it – one Chaldea looks very much like another, differing only in colors and the key the alarm sirens blare in. Her Chaldea, though, is more vivid, patched through with sand and ice and jungle, an untidy sprawling quilt of everywhere she's ever been.

A great second sign for the fact he's found Ritsuka's dream is that Fou launches himself at Merlin's face. That's also a pretty big tell.

“_Augh_,” says Merlin, flailing ungracefully with his free hand, automatically tucking his current bundle of starstuff against his chest with the other. “You ungrateful monster, what _now_?”

Fou scrabbles through his hair, sharp little beasty claws pulling painfully, and finally settles on his shoulder. His claws sink in where Merlin's robe has pulled to the side, drawing little beads of blood, and he nibbles on Merlin's ear with what Merlin feels is probably a certain amount of vindictiveness. It feels like a threat.

“Oh no,” Ritsuka says, out of breath after the run in Fou's wake. “I'm so sorry— oh, but you're here!” And then, heedless, she launches herself at Merlin to get her arms around his waist. Merlin squawks as Fou wobbles dangerously, drawing _additional _blood in order to stay attached and vertical, and then they all go sprawling into a patch of Uruk and Merlin gives up on the concept of not being injured and hugged.

He does manage to keep his precious burden out of the way, barely, only by sacrificing every other possible gain to the terrible duo currently assaulting him. “We've been trying to figure out a way to summon you,” Ritsuka says into his chest, “because you're _kind_ of a Heroic Spirit and it's not _fair_ you're stuck all the way out of the world forever, but it keeps not quite working and I've made friends with so many Casters but none of them seem to have any ideas either. Da Vinci said she thought you knew more than you were saying and that eventually you'd come talk to me about it, so— well, talk, mister!”

This was a terrible idea. He should have slunk in the back door and left her and Mash never the wiser. Merlin looks down at the top of her head and sighs, gustily, deeply put-upon. The tousled red mess of her hair shifts with it, gains a decorative flower.

He didn't mean to do any of this, really. He didn't _want_ feelings. He's still trying to refuse the idea of having them in the first place. There's more than a few reasons why he's been avoiding Chaldea, even though he is, in theory, perfectly capable of at least partially manifesting there. “I'm not going to talk while you've got me pinned like this,” he says, to stay contrary. “You've been taking lessons from Quetzalcoatl, haven't you.”

“Oops,” Ritsuka says, contrite. She scrambles back and up, dusting off her uniform du jour. “No, not really, Divine Spirits of her level are— um— kind of hard to sustain in Chaldea, apparently.”

“So you're mastering wrestling yourself, then.” Merlin picks himself up one-handed. Fou is somewhere in his hair, he can tell by the weight on his neck and the tiny hissing from behind him. It's just not worth arguing, it really isn't. “Well done! Good clothesline!”

“That wasn't a clothesline,” Ritsuka says, fixing on what is clearly the most important part of the conversation here. “More of a flying tackle. —Anyway! Now are you going to start talking? And what is that?”

Merlin looks at the echoes of Romani Archaman in his hand, then back at the earnest, bright-eyed savior of humanity, Chaldea's only surviving Master, she who reassembled human history through dint of sheer determination and friendship and wept, honestly and deeply, for every life she couldn't save. She has carried a lot, this girl, before her world even considers her legally an adult, and she still feels so much and so unreservedly. It's her strength, probably.

“...It's a secret,” says Merlin, who finds that he is sometimes abjectly terrified by that force of personality.

“Aww.” She pouts at him, turning up the puppy-dog eyes, but Merlin has had a great deal of exposure to faces like that and it's going to take more than that effort to crack him. “Okay, okay. Let's go, um...” Ritsuka scrunches up her face, and their surroundings shift to something like Chaldea's command room. There's the pseudo-planet humming in the center, blue and calm and glowing prosperous, and the quiet bustle of people who aren't quite there, and one side of the room is wholly open to the sun, to verdant trees and chirruping wildlife and a wind that smells of sea-spray. “There!”

“Very nice.” Merlin glances about briefly, draws over a chair from a nearby console that probably doesn't need it. He plonks himself down in it at the midpoint, between wall and wild. “What was it you wanted to talk about?”

“Why you're not visiting,” she says without missing a beat, prodding him in the chest with her index finger before doing as he's done, picking out a chair. She sits with her feet drawn up, and she studies him as she does, seeming to miss nothing.

He hopes she's missing something. “I'm working on something,” he says, answering truthfully but evasively. It’s most fun to play with the truth, anyway, and then he can’t be caught in a lie later. “It's taking up a lot of my time and attention, so I can't really do anything else intensive while I'm working on it. I should be done in a few months.”

“Aw, a few _months_.” It's not quite whining. “What's so important that you have to work on it so hard?”

“Also a secret,” he carols. The weight in his hair shifts as Fou scales his head, and Merlin winces. Despite the cheery face he's trying to put on, he's reasonably certain there's about to be _more_ blood. Cath Palug might not be all that he was – there is certainly a weight of power no longer quite there – but he is still a crotchety squirrelcat with a grudge against Merlin, _apparently_.

“Are you going to tell me eventually?” Ritsuka tries, coming at the matter a little differently. “Oh, come on, Fou, it's okay, we like him, remember?”

Fou does not remember this.

“Eventually,” Merlin says cheerfully. “If all goes well, I should be done by Da Vinci's birthday, and then I'll tell you all everything. How does that sound?”

“I _guess_,” Ritsuka says. “Soooo, how've you been?”

“Oh, you know,” he says. “Magical projects, imprisoned in a tower in Avalon. The usual.”

“...Right,” she says, wrinkling her nose up at him. “You're trying to put me off so I won't look at whatever it is you want to do, aren't you.”

It's honestly alarming, how consistently perceptive she is. Merlin knows his smile has frozen and can't quite seem to do anything about it. “Noooo?” he tries.

She looks unimpressed. “I guess you did promise you'd tell me eventually,” she says with a sigh, linking her fingers together and stretching her arms over her head. “It's still kind of rude to just drop by and then run off again, you know? I feel kind of used.”

“I don't think anyone's ever accused me of being polite,” Merlin says thoughtfully.

“That's because you're not,” she says fiercely, but she's smiling around the corners of it. “Okay. How about this? You stay and talk to me for five minutes—” She holds out a hand, fingers star-spread to illustrate for him the number five, as if he has no idea how to count by himself. “—and then I won't make a fuss or even try to peek at whatever it is you need to do in my dreams. 'Cause I _trust_ you, even if you're a troll sometimes. And when you're done whatever this is, I want to hear all about it. Okay?”

It is probably as fair of a deal as he's going to get. Merlin is — touched, strangely, and can't lay a finger on precisely why, and honestly doesn't want to examine it further. “Deal,” he says, and reaches out for a handshake.

She clasps his hand. They shake on it. “It wouldn't hurt you to stop by sometimes anyway,” Ritsuka says meaningfully.

“I have no idea what you mean,” Merlin says, the picture of shamelessness. He’ll be staying out of her dreams unless strictly necessary, thanks.

True to his word, though, he stays for a time. They talk. Ritsuka wants to know more about everything, like she always does — today she asks for stories about the Knights of the Round. Merlin does his best to relay light things instead of the disasters that come so readily to mind — it isn't hard, for instance, to figure out why Ritsuka wants to know more about Lancelot in particular. “Why don't I save some for Mash,” Merlin says, when they're nearing the end of the time he promised, or close enough to it.

“Oh, fine,” Ritsuka says, but her eyes are dancing. “I guess I'll let you go, then. Keep in touch, okay?”

She's asked him that no less than three times, all told. Merlin might, is the terrible thing. He waves at her, a little cheerful twinkle of fingers, and hops off his chair and makes his way off into the underbrush, almost entirely so she won't think what he needs is something out of Chaldea.

“Fou, fouuuu,” says the interloper who is _still on top of his head_. If Merlin rolls his eyes skyward he can just see the outcropping of white-prismatic fluff, and a little pink tongue that flicks in and out.

“You do not get an opinion about this,” he says. It doesn't come out as severely as he would like.

Through the jungle there are sounds as of jaguars – and jaguar warriors, suitably – but no Divine Spirit makes herself known, not even the smallest and cattiest among them. Merlin shapes Ritsuka's dream around to double back, and waltzes into the lower levels of Chaldea as if he has every right to be there, and once again picks up the hunt for Romani Archaman.

Most of Ritsuka's thoughts of Doctor Roman, summoned out of dreams by Merlin's whispering to her subconscious, come flavored with grief, or hope, or both. Merlin can't fault her for that – she was the one who saw him last, after all. Here is their meeting, with Doctor Roman all sheepish slacking, Lev Lainur yelling about how he had been meant to be in the command room. Is that sheer accident, or was it clairvoyance, some last instinct gathered in those moments of foresight before the Fuyuki Grail rewrote him into purely human shape?

Merlin wonders. Perhaps he'll have the opportunity to ask the man himself.

Largest in Ritsuka's dreams, the thing that comes up again and again even while Merlin is gingerly sorting through all the other moments and thoughts, is the last Singularity. Merlin is not, on the whole, surprised by this. Grieving brings things like this back and back again.

So he walks through it, through the improbable constructions, through the dream recollection of the magical circuits of King Solomon, ripped out of his corpse and laid into a ghastly parody of a temple. Ghost of Heroic Spirits flicker in and out as static images, less vivid than the Throne and the area surrounding it, bringing with them feelings of fierce safety and determination and friendship. Even feeling those filtered through Ritsuka, it's weird. Is that what heroism feels like?

Good thing he's not a hero.

Medusa had been kind enough to carry his messages, and Merlin had created good enough justification for not turning up himself. He's still not completely certain if he could or should have – but he was busy, anyway, watching and orchestrating and bridging, and he'd never have been able to _see_ everything if he was in it all himself. That's the trick with clairvoyance, see: it's genuinely hard to half-ass. To focus in one place, to _be_ in one place, you can't look any further afield than a few meters; and to see the world and all its presents and futures spread out before like a distant map makes it very, very hard to take a few steps without falling over.

Merlin chose to watch. They didn't need his help, anyway. He suspects Ritsuka knows it's a choice he made, not just an arbitrary limitation of the fun confluence between the hammer-force of human belief and the inconvenient fact that he isn't actually dead and probably won't ever be.

She hasn't mentioned it, though. And he's sure not going to. It's just going to stay right there, in the unsaid spaces between them, nice and safe and never talked about again.

His footsteps are terribly loud on the stone, especially when he has to hop-skip between pieces where the path has lost cohesion. Fou's claws tighten at the movements; the figures here don't seem to mind the sound, at least, mostly because they're frozen in memory-tableau, static without the dreamer's attention. Here is Ritsuka, mostly an idea of herself painted in a broad stroke by a mind more invested in everyone else around her; here is Mash's shield, standing without the support of its stalwart stanchion. Merlin runs his fingers along the edge of it, finds it the most solid thing in the entire dream, so real he's like to cut himself on it.

“_Fouuu_,” his spiteful passenger says, and launches right for the shield, swarming over it, all up and down its length in a white-flickering blur. When he settles it's in a precarious drape along the top edge, yawning wide with flashes of sharp teeth and small tongue.

He's much more adorable when he's not in Merlin's face. “Of course that's your favorite,” Merlin says, resentful fondness creeping into his tone. “Stay there, why don't you?”

“Fou,” he chirps, and, a little more thoughtfully, “Kyuuuu.” On the whole, Merlin is getting the impression of _I'm doing this because I want to, not because you told me to._

Well, whatever, it's the same result, and the one Merlin prefers. He turns away, rubbing the top of his head ruefully. Like he thought, his fingers come away bloodied. Beast.

He forgets to be offended for very long when his attention comes back around to Goetia and Romani-turned-Solomon. Ritsuka dreams Goetia most in its own shape, in that terrible amalgam made of flame and void and cracking apart into nothingness piece by pulsating piece, bent on destruction: _if I cannot have what I want, at least I will end you with me._

Merlin knows the sort.

Romani is calm and peaceful by comparison. He wears the face and regal garb of King Solomon, but his expression is more of the sheepish smile Merlin's seen on the doctor what must surely have been a few hundred times by now. Merlin circles him once, makes a face at the idea of his countenance. “No more self-sacrifice,” he says, as if it'll penetrate through a dream to a man whose existence is currently a little up in the air. “You've done your share, huh?”

There isn't an answer, and he didn't expect one. Merlin sighs, suddenly very tired of it all. Spare him from people who rush into the future they know will kill them, anyway. The beauty of tragedy starts to wear when you've seen it a few hundred thousand times. He dips his hand into King Solomon's hair, intending to simply snag whatever stardust he can and have done—

—Emotion hits him like a smith's blow, straight to the gut and twice as heavy. Ritsuka feels a lot, and she feels it _deeply_, with the whole of her body and soul. Merlin experiences vividly secondhand what it is to love Doctor Romani Archaman, idol fixation, self-deprecation, infinite kindness and all. Ritsuka had looked up to him – still looks up to him, one of her best introductions to Chaldea and the one who had been looking after her all along the way.

_He is the one who surrenders the world_, and Ritsuka is indignant and pained, and hoping, always hoping. It's one of her strongest suits. Merlin finds the image of ten rings cast skyward engraved unkindly and without permission into his mind's eye. They sparkle and turn and vanish over and over again, a man throwing all he has and is into the world and expecting nothing back.

Foolish, foolish man. He deserved better. They always do; but so rarely is Merlin caught close enough to _feel_ it.

Merlin is standing there for a long, long time, so much that the dream around him begins to fade entirely, one piece at a time. Fou strolls over to twine between his ankles – ah, yes, there's the attempt to bite his shin, which is foiled by boots but does the job of pulling Merlin out of that sea of painful hope and back into himself. “Thanks,” he says, very quietly, and he wipes his eyes.

They aren't wet, really, it's just a general reflexive reaction to having been standing unblinking so long. In a dream. Yep.

Fou scrambles up his leg, apparently for the sole purpose of leaving a track of clawmarks through cloth before he pushes off and launches into the fading landscape, trotting away. When there's a decent space between them he glances back, nose twitching and ears flickering.

Merlin follows him out, and wakes in Avalon with a number of new and stinging punctures which he is now going to have to take care of. Thanks, Cath Palug. Thanks.

...Still, he really is glad to see that Fou is so happy where he is, with the people he's with. He'll just be happiest if the sharp parts aren't inflicted on him again any time soon.

Anyway, he's spent so long hanging around Ritsuka's dreams, feeling emotions he is now going to put away and not feel ever again, that he's missed his chance with Mash, so that's going to have to wait for the next time she sleeps. Merlin checks on his bundle of accumulated memories and starstuff and finds it pulsing, huge and shining like a ripe fruit, if fruits were clouds that happened to glow whenever they felt like it. It's shot through with all Ritsuka's love and care, and Merlin honestly doesn't dare touch it bare-handed, at this point. He cups it with the sleeve of his robe—

—his heart does something horrible and aching—

—Merlin transplants it to the waiting coffin in Chaldea in a hurry and pulls his robe over his head, tugging the hood low. He needs to– something. He needs to take a break from this. Just knowing the feelings he's sorting through aren't his doesn't seem to make too much of a difference to the issue of feeling them, and there are so, so many reasons he perpetuates the idea that his incubus half makes it impossible for him to feel the same way normal people do.

It's all just.

Inconvenient.


	4. how bright the sun

Merlin’s ankle-deep in the comments section of a media article, because secretly he’s a masochist, when his computer chimes an instant message sort of a chime. Merlin takes a look, solely to decide if this is something worth responding to or not, not even intending to answer. 

It’s Da Vinci. Of course it is. Who else would it be.  
  


**ldavinci:** A few people reported dreaming of you, by the way. You’re not very subtle.  
**ldavinci:** The coffin is doing well. I don’t know how you got it to smell of frankincense and myrrh, though. I feel like I should be worried about that.  
**ldavinci:** Ritsuka’s in good spirits, too.  
  


Merlin doesn’t answer her; there really isn’t a lot to say on that topic. He wonders why she’s updating him with this little information— though he supposes it is good to know about the coffin’s state. He does, at least, stop reading the comments and move on to seeing if there’s anyone in Japanese legislature he could conceivably influence. The idol industry really needs better regulation, and he has every place to say this. 

Unfortunately, Da Vinci has not gotten any of his memos regarding not needing to talk to her, probably because he hasn’t actually told her this. As a result, she keeps messaging him, intermittently but steadily.

**ldavinci:** Mash said she didn’t see anything, though. She seemed a little let down.  
**ldavinci:** I suppose you’ve said often enough you don’t care about people individually, though! I know we shouldn’t expect much.

That one stings, and he’s never going to tell her it did, only smile and nod and agree with her if she presses. Merlin launches himself into dreams. Right now, it’s mostly people in the Americas who are sleeping, so that’s where he puts himself; but he keeps hearing, all through his wanderings, the quiet chime of instant messages. He needs to change that sound effect, or better yet, silence it entirely.

He returns, sulkily, some time before he really meant to, and reads through Da Vinci’s backlog of messages.

**ldavinci:** Coffin readings holding steady today, by the way.  
**ldavinci:** Laplace pinged off some sort of data ghost in the London area — it turned out to be nothing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it means we’re on the right track. Whatever you’re doing, it’s working, so keep doing it.  
**ldavinci:** That doesn’t mean maintaining radio silence, for the record.  
**ldavinci: **I’m starting to wonder if somebody’s dream ate you. Can that happen? With the average dreamer, that is, not someone like Tiamat.

Merlin wonders if she’s actively trying to prod him in every sensitive place that could possibly exist. It’s starting to look probable. Maybe she thinks if she does, he’ll be more likely to answer her. He can’t even say she’s entirely wrong about that.

**ldavinci:** Please confirm what Leviathan’s insides are like.  
**ldavinci:** Merliiiiiin.  
**ldavinci: **Answer me or I’m going to start asking the Knights of the Round for embarrassing stories.  
**ldavinci:** Gawain says you used to be quite the ladies’ man.  
**ldavinci:** Coffin readings still steady— no changes to report. Although I have had to convince two people already that I’ve taken to incense to help assuage the restless spirits of the computers, which is embarrassing.  
**ldavinci:** I’m blaming you, you know. When you’re done with this. I will publicly announce to everyone how many ridiculous lies you have made me tell.

**sagerose:** haha, is that supposed to be motivation for me to finish?

**ldavinci:** How about this. Finish, and I _won’t_ follow through on any of my threats?

**sagerose:** you make a compelling argument, i suppose.

**ldavinci:** Good.  
**ldavinci: **You’ve been quiet for a while.

He stalls over how to answer this, drumming his fingers on his knee. It’s a not-quite-disguised attempt at fishing, only what she’s fishing for is if he’s _okay_ or not. Merlin develops the sinking feeling that Da Vinci is beginning to extend her caring to him. Probably best to remind her that the only reason to keep track of what he’s up to is because they’re collaborating on a project.

**sagerose:** i never said i’d be in constant contact, after all! i have things to do.  
**sagerose:** i’ll be in touch to check on how the coffin’s doing.

And then he disconnects from the messenger, taking himself properly offline, so he won’t have to listen to the chimes of her annoyed messages for the foreseeable future. He buries himself in interconnected dreams of orgies for a solid week.

He’s sated and even-tempered when he drags himself back to physicality, loose-limbed and content. But with the outside stimulation gone, the nagging of the task he has before him rises again as he stares at the sky, bubbling up through his ribcage to nudge at his throat with a vague, distant sense of guilt. —He’s got plenty of time until when he promised Da Vinci, okay? It’s only February. He doesn’t have to be working on Romani Archaman’s Spirit Origin twenty-four-seven.

But...

The theory is, right, that if he puts everyone’s impressions together, they’ll get a working Spirit Origin signature out of all the overlaps. That’s why Merlin has to be as thorough as possible. But even then, it’s not going to be quite the real thing — it’s just something to look for. Something that _could_ be Romani Archaman, if they find the right ingredients to add to it. Dreams of him. The traces he has left where he’s touched other people’s lives, the lingering atoms that even the briefest of contacts dislodges, scatters from person to person. Once they have that as complete as it can be — and Merlin suspects it can never be _fully_ complete, only good enough — then, or so the theory goes, Laplace can scan through history for living matches, and Trismegistus can calculate trajectories going into the future, and eventually they’ll find someplace where the remnants of the man landed. Merlin doesn’t know, yet, what form that will take. A human with amnesia? A spirit that’s forgotten its own true name? A sad pile of bones and scraps and tarnished jewelry on the ruins of a throne that’s long since collapsed? 

Da Vinci did say Laplace had pinged off something already. Even if it turned out to be a data ghost, a false impression, Merlin will bet it’s somewhere Romani _was_.

His _best_ theory is that some amalgam of Romani and Solomon will have enough strength behind the belief and understanding and the remembrance of his story to manifest as a phantom spirit, probably in one of the remnant-driven Singularities that keep popping up here and there. Removed from the Throne of Heroes, after all, doesn’t mean that he can just erase himself from history, pop culture, and three different major religions. There’s a ghost of him out there somewhere.

And, it occurs to Merlin, that if that ghost appears in a remnant singularity while they don’t have enough data to pick him out and leyshift him back, then more may be lost. Belief might raise the same phantom spirit up again, but every tale changes with each telling. If they don’t get it right the first time, Merlin wonders if they’ll get _Doctor Roman_ back at all.

Which means he has to go and get back to work, _now_. Never mind that he’s still arguing internally with some complicated feelings. Just knowing they’re shadows of Ritsuka’s doesn’t make them go away, unfortunately.

...After he’s done, he can stay away for a while, and purge the accumulated nonsense out the good old-fashioned way: sex and other people’s dreams.

Reluctantly, he boots up Chaldea’s intranet messenger again, just to see how many messages from Da Vinci he has. It turns out the answer is one, dated four days ago:

**ldavinci: **You’re an asshole, Merlin.

He’s so glad she noticed. 

Merlin puts that away and leans comfortably in a corner, and puts himself right back to sleep, looking for the dreams of one Mash Kyrielight. She has a very regular bedtime, it’s very convenient.

Less convenient is the fact that she’s waiting for him, somehow. There’s a broad grassy plain, and in the distance the walls of Camelot — _of course_ — and Mash, in Chaldea’s uniform, cross-legged on the ground right where Merlin has found her. Fou is in her lap, cooing happily as she rubs his ears; his tail bushes out and his needle-sharp fangs come into evidence as Merlin approaches. 

Mash contains him with a blithely tightened hold and careful petting around the ears. This officially makes her Merlin’s new favorite for the foreseeable future. She tilts her head back to smile at Merlin, but doesn’t get up. “Hello, Merlin. It’s nice to see you again.”

Merlin spends a few seconds considering whether or not he wants to be at face level with Cath Palug, but— honestly, if he wants to chew on Merlin’s face, he’ll find away. In deference to Mash’s current height, Merlin flops down onto the grass next to her, and returns a sunny smile. “What a coincidence meeting you here!”

She shakes her head gently. Ahhh, she really does look like Galahad in some lights. How much of that is chance? “Not really,” she says softly. “I’ve been waiting for you. Senpai said you might visit.”

“Oh,” Merlin says, intelligently. She must have been expecting him for upwards of a week, then. Oops. “Do you dream like this often?”

“Sometimes.” Mash frowns a little as she contemplates, bowing her head over Fou and applying additional attention until he burbles something resignedly cheerful. “I usually know when I’m dreaming now. Before, sometimes I dreamed of Goetia... Sometimes, it would pretend to be Doctor Roman. Past a certain point, I could usually tell. So it got easier to be sure of what’s a dream and what isn’t. And I thought, if you meant to visit in dreams, then I should wait to greet you.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Merlin says, which is officially his expenditure of manners for the year. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.”

Once more, she shakes her head. “Senpai said you were working on something important. Can I help?”

Yes. Yes, she can. “How about this,” Merlin says. “Ritsuka said you might like some stories about the Knights, especially Lancelot.” Yes, he’s definitely not imagining the way she attends more closely now. “I need to wander around in your dreams for a little while, and I need you not to look. How does a trade sound?”

“A trade of stories?” Mash tilts her head to the side. “...I'd like that. You'll explain why eventually?”

Merlin nods. In an ideal world, he'll explain why by simply vanishing and leaving them with a new and functional CMO, but he may wind up stuck with some of the explanation work anyway. He'll find out later. “Don't worry, I won't leave you in the dark forever,” he says cheerfully. “Just a couple more months. Let's see. How about three stories? If I have to come back, I'll bring more. Can I assume you know all the classics?”

“Um,” Mash says, focusing for a moment on containing Fou. “Sort of. I've done some research on the internet, and... Doctor Roman and Da Vinci helped, too, but there wasn't always a lot of time, and a lot of people disagree on which stories are right. And Lancelot is... that is, he's been summoned as a Servant in Chaldea, but I don't always know how to talk to him. It's... kind of strange, sometimes.”

Yeah, Merlin figures it would be pretty awkward. He's not going to put that relationship on his list of things to meddle in, though. He's pretty sure if that keeps on as it is, Ritsuka will step in, and she's very hard for anyone to say no to. “I'll bet he's the same,” Merlin says with relish. “All right. I'll tell you what_ I_ saw of Dolorous Guard.” The Lady of the Lake had her help all over Lancelot for that one, which made it all a little harder to see from a distance; but Merlin had been keeping something of an eye out anyway, even from afar. He'd known the leopard was important.

Mash is attentive but quiet, an almost-perfect audience, and what points she loses on the front of appreciative noises she gains back for the fact that she's containing Fou as easily as if he's a content plush doll, which means Merlin doesn't have to contend with him at all, and can remain blessedly unbloodied. He walks her through the story of Dolorous Guard with plenty of color commentary on Lancelot's observed allergy to taking credit for his deeds or even, indeed, telling anyone his name.

All the Knights' stories will blend into each other eventually, if Merlin lets them, in one long cascade of brotherhood and ill-advised decisions. (He only makes the latter value judgments out loud when he's looking to pick a fight.) Instead he shifts into slightly lighter stories, a pair of short anecdotes. Lancelot, unclear what to do with a cat; Lancelot, so determined to keep his name to himself that he suffered any number of embarrassments, up to and including a near miss with public nudity.

Generally, Merlin feels, public nudity livens up most stories.

Mash may or may not feel the same way, judging by the red blush she acquires. It's not enough, though, to stop her from asking, before Merlin goes: “Um– Merlin. Can I ask why you need me not to look?”

“You can definitely ask,” Merlin says brightly, dusting off the seat of his pants. There's not actually any dust there, but it's the thing to do after getting up from sitting down in a large open field. Graciously, he gives her a few moments to process before he moves to wander off.

Mash frowns very slightly at him. “Why do you need me not to look?” she asks, instead of outright calling him on the evasion.

“Hm,” Merlin says, because he hadn't actually gotten to that part of the lie yet. “It's one of those things where observation compromises the thing itself, you know? If you know what I'm doing, you might think about it too hard, and I need your _first_ thoughts, not your second thoughts.” That doesn't even sound too implausible. Da Vinci would be able to say he's lying, of course; but he's pretty sure Da Vinci won't go so far, because then she'll be the one stuck with further explanations.

Thoughtfully Mash digests this, and finally nods. “Okay,” she says. “Senpai trusts you, so I don't mind trusting you too.”

Merlin's of mixed feelings regarding the trust that's been so recently, so frequently extended to him. He can see why they want to, and in fairness he hasn't actually betrayed them or let them down yet, and Ritsuka in particular trusts like a well-placed blade, but he still kind of wishes they wouldn't. Even if it _has_ been making his life significantly easier, to trade on that trust.

“Thanks,” he says aloud, with the sunniest smile he knows how to give, the one that crinkles his eyes at the corners, and it seems to reassure Mash, so that's good enough to be getting on with.

Fou does not appear convinced. Merlin pointedly ignores him.

“Ah, wait a moment,” Mash says, hurriedly, as Merlin has just turned to go, already a couple of steps into leaving. “One more thing, please—!”

Because at the end of the day Merlin is apparently a sucker, he turns back toward her, and then the breath is knocked out of him by the freight train that is a hug from Mash Kyrielight. There's a cranky biting squeak from between them which Mash ignores in favor of squeezing the air out of Merlin.

Gently, very gently, and mostly because he doesn't have anywhere else to put his arms, Merlin drops a hand on top of her head and ruffles up her hair. “All right, already,” he says, not quite laughing. “I've got places to be.” He really needs to do something about this. They keep hugging him.

He'll... deal with it later.

“I know,” Mash says, and releases him, keeping hold of Fou with a deft twist of her arms as she steps back. “Please travel safely, Merlin.”

He doesn't bid her a proper farewell as he turns and goes, heading the opposite way from Camelot. At first there's just the unending grass, and Merlin swears he can feel Mash watching him. With a little effort he makes the grassy fields ahead of him a bucolic country village, and disappears into that; and there, somewhere amid the sheep, he turns the pasture into one of those from Uruk; and in Uruk, he has no qualms about wandering into the palace and informing a nearby door that it opens up to Chaldea.

Mash's Chaldea feels more like home than any of the others, maybe. Merlin tries, with a reasonable amount of success, to tell himself he hates it, that the fuzzy edges on the steel corners mean nothing and the bare-edged room with its almost nonexistent personal touches isn't warm-lit with nostalgia and a sense of fondness.

He finds Doctor Roman in Mash's room, of course. Only it's not _only_ Doctor Roman — there's something split-skinned and horrifying under him, such that when Merlin touches he feels void burning-cold against his fingertips, even only in a dream of a memory of a dream. He knows, then, what Goetia was doing in this dream, borrowing a trusted shape to whisper and hope to take some of that trust in turn, or if not that, then to scare, to unsettle.

Merlin prises the two apart layer by layer, with a grim determination pulling his lips back from his teeth. Here is Doctor Roman, asking after Mash's well-being, a little sad-eyed around her sometimes; here is Goetia, smiling too wide, all crimson-stained and happy about all the wrong things. It takes longer than he would like – Goetia had followed the memory and inhabited it, and Mash's recollection of it _now_ knows that, but she hadn't when she first dreamed it, and the original memories are somewhere underneath all those layers.

His fingertips are singed by the time he's done, crackling with cold, and even here in this dream the skin sloughs off them. These, like Cath Palug's bites, have the feeling of a true injury, something that will persist even when Merlin wakes, even into Avalon. Even in dreams, Merlin can't shove his hands into a fire that isn't his and expect to remain unburned.

But it's worth it, isn't it? For his pains he has the crackling void shredded into pieces at his feet like the papery peel of an onion, and the echo of Romani's Spirit Origin underneath it is as strong a piece of data as ever.

—This new soft cloud feels like the home Merlin barely remembers; it feels paternal, or the way Merlin imagines paternal feels when he's never been on the wrong end of it. What is this foolish quest _doing_ to him?

Worse, Mash still has more to offer, in these dreams and memories. Merlin grits his teeth and tucks his prize into the crook of his arm, where it settles too easily, and he trudges onward.

There's a fragment of a dream that looks like Cath Palug, and the only reason Merlin thinks it isn't the real thing is that it's a wash of color, so bright as to outline a scattered silhouette that only barely imitates the bitey cat himself. A photo negative, an inverse image. Merlin gives this a wide berth – it's tied in, by how the wild colors of it leak past him and paint the surroundings, but it isn't about the man he's looking for, not really. Mash can have this privacy. Also, Merlin doesn't necessarily trust anything that looks like Cath Palug any more, owing to Fou's skillful application of randomized negative reinforcement.

Other dreams of Doctor Roman require just as much onion-peeling to get to the true core of them. Gentleness, helpfulness, careful concern. When it comes to the real thing, Mash trusts him nearly implicitly. When he panics it concerns her, but there's a quiet faith under it all, with a core like iron.

Well! She is a Knight of the Round Table, after all, and a regular lion.

Merlin doesn't find any of the final singularity here, nothing for the Temple. Half his fingertips are bleeding steadily by the time he finds the last, most relevant dream-piece, and fortunately for his hands, this one doesn't chill him when he touches it. Instead there's just peace, soft and melancholy – something understanding, the sort of kindness Merlin would hate to feel turned on him. This is Mash's lingering vision of Doctor Roman: talking over her medical assessment, trying very hard to be clever and subtle about his evasions. But she can see where he's not telling her something, too.

She already knows, at that point, that she doesn't have much time to live, and she loves his soft heart even if she wants to know for _sure_ how many heartbeats her own has left in it. Looking back the impression is colored with fondness and grief, a combination Merlin is coming to know very, very well.

He's gotten to know Romani well enough by now that even through the hazy layers of Mash's memories and dreams, he can see the self-deprecating quirk of the doctor's mouth. And Merlin doesn't _know_, for sure, but...

After all, he's been there, hasn't he? He walked away from the King of Knights, even knowing what was coming. Coward, he'd called himself, and known it to be truth, and eventually accepted it as simply who he is. Merlin will be surprised if Romani isn't saying the same things to himself, here.

Artoria knew where she was going. So, too, did Mash.

Mash's love is softer than Ritsuka's, but she has an unending will behind it. Merlin folds all the witnessed pieces into his burden. There is a piece that shines a little brighter than the rest, out from under peach cotton-candy; and when Merlin flicks the anomaly gingerly he finds only his own memory-fiber at the root, astonishingly, painfully bare in his understanding.

Merlin has never been too proud to flee.


	5. kings and shepherds

Back in his tower, back in sharp, solid reality, Merlin wastes no time about sending what he's collected along to the coffin. He wants no more of this in his hands, where he might chance to touch it further.

He'd forgotten he was bleeding. Did he get blood drops in Romani's starstuff? Merlin frowns vaguely, settling down to bend over his hands and see about dragging some of Avalon's magic up through them to mend. He doesn't think he did, and it shouldn't make much of a difference anyway. Blood is more resoundingly physical than anything else that's been set into the coffin, so it shouldn’t mingle badly. Probably.

Too late now, anyway, even if he did. Merlin stops the bleeding, tidies himself up a bit – casts a look at his flower-computer and decides it just isn't worth it right now – but what's his alternative, if time is an issue? Right back into dreams? He's already been through most of those who knew Romani at a surface level, the passing-touchers, the footprints from three-nights-gone. Most of what's left is...

Well, most of what's left is David, because Merlin needs some sort of perspective on _Solomon_ to tie everything together, and best if it isn't Solomon-the-King but Solomon the man, Solomon the boy that was. None of the Animuspheres are there to help, and no one else who had come into contact with that Caster had survived the Fuyuki Grail War.

But Merlin can't do without some type of Solomon, and he's already skimmed up as much as Ritsuka and Da Vinci have to offer on that topic.

Distantly resentful, Merlin looks over to Chaldea, looking for other potential sleepers to delay the inevitable. Some of the Servants, he knows, do sleep, catnaps at a minimum, to help reduce magical load. Da Vinci isn't habitually one of them, but her summoning is different.

There are a few Servants sleeping at the moment. Merlin hop-skips through their dreams, as gentle and as fleeting as he can be with those who know how to recognize his touch even at a distance. —does Ritsuka even realize she's got at least two Hassans in the vents? He passes over the youngest one's dreams, recognizing the Knights in them at a distance, and leaves be. Those, he doesn’t need.

Cu Chulainn's dreams are as inhospitable as Merlin would expect, and he gets a predatory grin from the Child of Light almost as soon as he steps through. “Just passing by,” Merlin says cheerfully, discovering that he's manifested his staff. He passes it from hand to hand and eyes the bone spear that hums and threatens fractals. “Seen Doctor Roman?”

The Hound of Ulster bares his teeth, and Merlin remembers why he's always been so _happy_ Cu Chulainn is easiest to summon as a Lancer. Dreams have no such restrictions. In fact, Merlin considers, it's possible he's wandered into a dream of the _riastrad_, judging by the way Cu Chulainn's flesh shifts.

“You know what, I'll come back later,” Merlin says, still as bright and happy as he knows how even in the face of certain bodily harm, and he skips along anyway. It's so nice that a berserk Cu doesn't have nearly the presence of mind to use the Gae Bolg properly.

He steps into another dream, but it's just all electricity and factories. Doesn't take a genius to spot an Edison dream – no, Merlin is absolutely not sitting through this. He refuses. He returns to the waking room mildly defeated, resigned to his fate, and intending to query Da Vinci regarding David's whereabouts, and if he can be convinced to take a nap.

There's already a message waiting for him.  
  


**ldavinci:** Enkidu stopped by to say you should look in on Gilgamesh.  
**ldavinci: **Isn't that a fun sentence to have typed!   
**ldavinci:** Let me know when you're up for it and I'll let them know the timing.  
  


Merlin stares at the messages, pulling his mouth out of the frown it wants to drift into. This is pretty much good news. The Heroic Spirit of Gilgamesh favors the Caster incarnation, these days, when he hangs around Chaldea. It makes him... well, easier, for as much as that means where Gilgamesh is involved. Also, and more to the point, Gilgamesh was at the time of his life a master of magecraft, and possessed of enough clairvoyance to tell the future, now and then. There's more than a few reasons he was considered the next candidate for Grand Caster.

As a Heroic Spirit, he is still all of those things, and wiser, more tempered than his younger self. Especially with Enkidu around, although Merlin knows better than to ask for or frankly even look at those details.  
  


**sagerose: **all right! i was about to ask you to tell David to take a nap, but that sounds much more fun.

**ldavinci:** Sorry, you said Gilgamesh sounds like more fun than David?  
**ldavinci:** Ah, of course. You're allergic to feelings. You fake it very well sometimes.

**sagerose:** it’s true! i should call you the wrong name once in a while so you don't think i'm getting attached to you.

**ldavinci:** Perish the thought, Peregrine.   
  


This time Merlin's restraint of his mouth is trying not to smile. She's getting the hang of it, really.  


**sagerose:** exactly. anyway, David? you may as well tell all three of them to have a siesta.

**ldavinci:** Will do!  
**ldavinci:** I'm sure you're not surprised by this, but the coffin readings are holding steady.  
**ldavinci:** I made a fancier out of order sign for it, too.  
**ldavinci:** I thinalsdkghfj ;aldkfja;sh

**sagerose:** ? 

**ldavinci:** Enkidu walks very quietly.  
**ldavinci:** They say they're not going to sleep, but they'll watch over Gilgamesh while you do what you have to.  
**ldavinci:** I suppose Gilgamesh was scrying over my shoulder. :/  
  
**sagerose:** man, clairvoyant people sure are annoying, huh?

**ldavinci:** They certainly are.   
**ldavinci:** Sweet dreams, Merlin.  


Merlin's laughing to himself as he drops himself into a corner and flips his hood up to take a nap, and he's amused enough at the distant image of Enkidu dropping out of the ceiling behind Da Vinci that it takes him a solid few minutes to put himself to sleep properly.

Getting into Gilgamesh's dreams is almost exactly what Merlin expected it would be: face-first into the Wall of Uruk. At least with Merlin having been pretty sure what he'd find, he stops before he can actually hit it, and takes a step back. “Hail, the King!” he calls up toward the top of the wall, his tone as flip as he can possibly make it.

There isn't a man atop the wall; and then there is, the sun glinting fierce shine off his hair and ornaments. “You're late, Merlin,” he calls back down, with some good-tempered amusement.

Merlin lifts his hand to wave cheerfully. “Surely you saw that I would be; and if that's the case, I can't actually be late, can I, King Gilgamesh?”

Gilgamesh shakes his head and alights, drifting down from the wall in deft, gold-edged footsteps. When he is at the ground he is still, somehow, taller than Merlin. “I know what you're up to,” he says.

Briefly, Merlin sketches a little bow, just enough to be respectful without implying fealty. “Oh, good, I don't have to explain myself. Can I have what I need?”

The look Gilgamesh gives him is tolerantly irritated. “You aren't welcome in the depths of my dreams, cambion of Avalon,” he says; but he produces something to hand to Merlin anyway, a tablet that glimmers copper and verdigris instead of the gold one would expect from the King of Heroes. “So I've taken the liberty of collecting your materials for you. Take it in good health.”

“Never anything but,” Merlin says, wryness creeping into his tone. He's not taking offense; Gilgamesh more than many knows what someone like Merlin can find just by watching, let alone wandering into the subconscious. Merlin suspects there is but one person who would have that privilege.

He cushions his hands with the sleeves of his robe as he takes the offered tablet, just in case skin contact turns out to be an unpleasant surprise of emotion. “Thanks for the extra effort,” he adds, since it doesn't hurt to be polite with Gilgamesh.

Gilgamesh waves off the thanks. “It is a thanks between kings,” he says, neatly dismissing Merlin. “He is owed that much.”

Catch Merlin trying to thank him again. “Great,” Merlin says brightly. “I'll be off, then. Dreams to plunder, you know how it is.”

“I prefer a solid treasury,” Gilgamesh informs him loftily. “—Ah. A moment.”

Merlin hadn't even started leaving yet, tempting though it was. He tilts his head in query.

For a moment Gilgamesh's red eyes are distant; then it's clear to see he's in the present moment again. “Remember, Merlin, what it is to be a King,” he says, just on the Gilgamesh side of pointed.

“I know it well enough,” Merlin says. He sees where this is going – he goes to speak to King David, of Solomon, and of that small and unenviable peerage of which he and Solomon and Gilgamesh are part, Merlin himself is the only one who is no king. But he has seen what it demands from people, time and time again, and he's just as happy never wearing it. “A king cannot be human; a king belongs to the people.”

“The people belong to the king,” Gilgamesh corrects, as Merlin knew he would, and there's a sharp-edged smile on his face. “Keep it in mind.”

“I shall,” Merlin says. He's not so much full of himself as to turn down advice offered from this particular source. “Until next time, King Gilgamesh.”

Distant laughter, smug and pleased with himself, follows Merlin as he goes.

Already he's seeking the feel of David's dreams. Merlin hasn't been here before— it takes more fumbling than he cares to admit to take the right sidelong step into the third dream over. When he finds it there's a different sun in the sky, closer to the horizon. This pale sky speaks more of the early morning than the high, bright noon over Uruk.

There are also sheep.

At first all Merlin sees before him is sheep – not pastured, this is a flock out in the wild, but they stick close to each other for grazing nevertheless. The gap in their pattern jumps out at him first, and carefully Merlin skirts the flock, trying not to startle any of them. The youth now obvious there lifts a hand in greeting, then pats the rock beside him; he himself is leaning against it, apparently relaxed, but with sharp eyes to the surroundings that give the lie to his lazy posture.

Not quite what Merlin expected. He takes the rock, tucking his feet up under him. For some few moments of silence, he and David consider the sheep.

Merlin breaks the quiet first. “You know,” he says, as one of the smaller ewes picks her head up and ambles a little toward them. “When Alexander was summoned as a boy, he didn't remember his adulthood, even though he was indubitably the same Heroic Spirit who would be Iskandar, King of Conquerors.”

“That so?” David says peaceably.

“And it's not really a surprise you look like this,” Merlin goes on. “The story of your defeat of Goliath is the best-known one, after all! No wonder you would appear to be your younger self, especially summoned as an archer. But you're the full sum of yourself, aren't you?”

“I am.” David straightens up a little, squinting over the flock; one of the sheep on the other side has begun to drift further away in search of the greenest leaves. He whistles, low and sweet and a little chiding, and she swings her head back the other way. “That's not your point, is it?”

Merlin thinks better of it before asking why David looks as he does. The king belongs to the people. Artoria as a girl loved country festivals, and grooming horses. “It's nice to be a shepherd instead of a king, isn't it?” Merlin says cheerfully, and barrels on ahead. “No, it's not really my point. I wanted to talk to you about Solomon.”

“I know,” David says. He stretches his arms out, slow and limbering.

“Did Da Vinci tell you?” Merlin wants to know. It would make his life a lot easier, but he wasn't certain how vested in making his life easier Da Vinci is, lately.

David shakes his head, and there's a sidelong quirk of an expression. “Do you think I don't know what a temple smells like?” he says, half reproachful. “Cedar and olive; stacte and frankincense; onycha and galbanum. All these things, and the sweeter spices besides, have been rife in the control room in Chaldea lately. I may not know exactly what you're doing, but it isn't hard to guess it has something to do with...”

There is, only because Merlin is looking for it, the barest grimace. David gets to his feet, leans on a crook that just happens to now be in his hand with the enduring convenience of dreams. “Walk with me,” he says.

Merlin is lamentably used to walking with kings. He gets to his feet and sets his robe in order, and follows where David leads, a habitual half-step behind so he does not seem the equal to the king. Most of the sheep vanish into the clouds of untended dreams behind them, with only a faint baa and the ring of a distant bell to say that they were ever there in the first place; but one, smaller and darker than most of the others, not quite an adult, follows with a jaunty step.

Perhaps it represents something. Perhaps it's just that in the end, the shepherd cannot leave the flock, and the king will always have been a shepherd, once.

There is something to be said about which direction the belonging runs, but Merlin can't lay his finger on it yet. It will come to him.

David walks them through a war-camp, not so different from those Merlin has seen though the time is some centuries different. There is, distantly, harp music; then it's gone, and they're moving on, to a city warm in the late summer-day heat, golden in the light of the setting sun though most of it is truly only pale stone. The paths David picks are more winding than straightforward. Once or twice, though, Merlin catches the city rearranging to suit where they're going, and he has to wonder how much David walked among the people – how much of this is memory, how much the ideal of the city. Here the sheep can’t keep up with them, wanders off distractedly into a cross-street. Perhaps they’ll see it again.

The sound of people persists, distant but present, growing softer as they walk toward the palace at the center. Merlin doesn't necessarily want to start anything, nor to break the unspeaking space between them when he really has no idea what he would say – so he waits, and eventually, as they're passing under one of the gates into the courtyard spaces, David finally begins. “How much of the stories do you know?”

Merlin shrugs lightly, flippantly. “Before my time,” he says, “and I am not a godly man. Not a man at all, in fact, by some arguments! Tell it to me as if I were new, if you can bear it.”

David eyes him a little askance, just a half-step ahead still. He walks as a man who does not need to see where he is going to be sure the path is there; and he is older now, truly a man instead of a youth, still sharp around the jaw and built as one not yet used to a soft life. “Once,” he says, firmly. “What is it specifically that you need, Mage of Flowers?”

He's not wrong to give Merlin that sort of look. Merlin knows more of the stories than he's leading David to believe, but he wants to hear things fresh, hear what David thinks is most relevant. “Memories,” Merlin says, as the palace halls twist around their forward motion to bring them a destination. “You know Solomon is gone from the Throne of Heroes; but I think all he's done is make himself a ghost, and a hard one to find. I'm reconstructing his Spirit Origin, and to do that, what I need from you is who he was to you. I won't diminish them, only borrow.” Kings need teasing, Merlin usually finds, to lighten the world around them; but David is also a man who has lost his son.

“I see,” David says, thoughtful, and there are stairs, and then the roof of the palace. The city stretches out before, the late sunlight painting all the buildings till the whole thing might as well be King Gilgamesh's treasury for how it glows with gold. Below, there are courtyards and courtyards, and— ah. This story.

Merlin studies David's face, finds his expression somewhere between soft and hungry; and, naturally, below the palace where his gaze rests, there is a woman bathing, apparently unaware of the observation. Like everything else in the city at this hour, she's limned with gold, every curve thrown into glowing relief. This is how David saw her, then.

“...I forget myself,” David says, and lowers himself to sit on the edge of the palace wall, head tilted back to the sky instead of at the woman below. Merlin follows suit, holding the tablet from Gilgamesh carefully in his lap. “I cannot say if this is what I felt when I was alive, but this is how I remember it now: I saw her, and I wanted her, without a second thought for right or wrong. To have Bathsheba, I arranged for her husband to die.” A pause. “Well, it is murder even if it was not my hand on the blade, is it not?”

The people belong to the king, hm. “I'd say so,” Merlin agrees.

“So God would say, too.” David swings his feet, bouncing his heels off the stone; he looks younger again, almost the shepherd boy he was. “For that sin I lost two sons – and sometimes I wonder, now, if it was not three. The first child I had with Bathsheba died before he could be named; and the second child I had by her was Solomon, and he was always going to be king.”

And the king, after all, belongs to the people, before anything else.

There's something peaceable about the way David relays it all now. As though he's above it, no longer in it, and can reflect on it like it's only a story – and yet he was not eager to tell it even once, and the way he looks to the sky and pauses can only make Merlin wonder.

“I don't remember the later parts as well,” David goes on eventually. “As I said. I am all of myself; but you were not wrong, that my youth is strongest. I remember I was often busy with war and governing, and much of Solomon's childhood was at Nathan's side, not mine. Only when Absalom rebelled against me was Solomon more with me, and then his boyhood was already gone. And it is a terrible thing, to fight your son; worse, I think, with another son at your side. Absalom died, and I grieved, and Solomon was with me; and when I was older, when all began to fade and it was harder to bear my duties, when the warmth of a fire was no longer enough to reach me, I proclaimed to the world that Solomon was king. And he was.”

It's all just a narrative, still – mostly. David's voice barely varies. But David does not look at Merlin, and the sun is beginning to set in earnest, burnishing the sky to copper and brass and casting long, long shadows.

Merlin would say that he, too, has given a child to the people; but Artoria always did make her own choices, and Merlin can't honestly say he had any better claim on her than that of the cheerful wild uncle, there and gone again as the wind carries. It hardly seems a fair comparison here and now. “So,” Merlin says, with a brittle brightness against the encroaching dusk. “That's a lot of things that happened.”

“But you want to know my feelings on the topic.” David leans back on his hands. “I understand. You have to understand, in turn – it was all a very long time ago. I've tried to let go of many old feelings, to stay clear-headed, to be capable of the things for which I was called from the Throne.”

There's another _but_ there; Merlin can practically hear it. He gestures as if to say it aloud.

David's smile quirks wry and Merlin sees Romani in his face, just for a moment. “But there are some things even I could not let go of,” David says then. “I wanted to know my son; but from the day he was born, he wasn't only mine. The kingdom seemed bigger, and the grief seemed bigger, and then Solomon was a man and I didn't know where the time had gone. There were times I envied him, and how easily ruling came to him; there were times I pitied him, for never having had the freedom to choose something else. Mostly...”

There is a long, long pause. The deep blue of dusk, the diamond of stars, has overtaken most of the sky.

“The past is the past, and it's a child's wish to want to undo it,” David says. He draws his legs up under him, moves back from the edge of the wall, and he looks like the man again. “Men carry regret in the place of that wish, and I know it well enough. And it stings, to know my son was there beside us all along in Chaldea, and I never saw it; and then he was gone.”

“Pretty much every Servant thought Doctor Roman was a coward,” Merlin offers lightly. He couldn't begin to guess if it's at all useful or helpful; it's just what he has. “Instinctively. No one could blame you for not looking closer, right?”

It's definitely King David that raises an eyebrow at Merlin. “I liked Doctor Roman eventually,” he says. “I still had that feeling, like everyone else, but he was easy to get along with when it came down to it, and he almost never stopped smiling. He was someone who wanted for a closer look, and no one did. King or Doctor or Commander, he was a role to nearly everyone.”

Merlin remembers how much he hates it when kings _look_ at him like they know something of him. “These things happen when you're larger than life,” he says too brightly, and he picks his feet up and stands, tablet tucked under one arm. “Thanks for telling me. I appreciate it. I still need to— can I see? Walk through your dreams and memories? I need to touch, to take something away with me.”

The king looks up at him. Merlin is reminded of the difference in status, and promptly decides that in this moment and in this place he doesn't care; but whether or not he cares apparently makes little difference to a gaze that transfixing.

“Yes,” David says. “All right. I'll come with you.”

The shepherd-youth hops nimbly to his feet, and he leads Merlin down again, into the palace. Now there are shades in it, a hundred people Merlin doesn't know. David's path takes them along seemingly randomly, from room to room without a discernible pattern, but eventually Merlin begins to pick a boy in red out of the multitude of shades. Lanky, brown-skinned and white-haired and bare-armed, and when they catch up to the boy leaning over a map of Israel, he's wearing a gentle absent smile Merlin last saw on Doctor Roman's face.

“I'll wait here,” David says from the archway into this room, and there he leans– as Merlin glances back, the sheep from earlier reappears. It's found them again, apparently, whatever it represents or whatever memory it might be, this piece of the flock that has followed them all the way into Jerusalem and out of the winding streets. Without missing a beat David unleans and crouches down, either to check it over or greet it.

One can take the shepherd out of the field, but one can't take the shepherd out of the king, apparently.

Merlin wonders if Solomon ever laid hands to a farm animal so familiarly as his father is doing now; then he puts it from his mind, and turns back to the young king.

Based on previous dreams Merlin was expecting a frozen tableau, but when he reaches to touch, the boy sees him move, turns inquisitive golden eyes on him. “Oh, hello,” Solomon says. He sounds more modern than ancient; perhaps in this place he's colored by Merlin's expectations, by David's modern learnings. “It's you. There you are.”

“It's me!” Merlin agrees, in a show of automatic cheer, though he has no idea who the phantom memory-dream-image thinks he is, if it – he – thinks at all. “Can I have what I'm looking for, please?”

Solomon considers the request with all the gravity of a king. “You don't know who I mean you are, do you?” he asks, head tilted very slightly. “It's all right, I see you. Here.” He lifts one hand to the pale braid on his shoulder, barely past his collarbone. It's only a portion of the snowy mane, and certainly nowhere near the prodigious length he'll have when he's a man grown. The boy makes a motion, almost slicing, just past the nape of his neck; the entire looped braid comes free, and he offers it to Merlin. “You have everything you need, Grand Caster.”

Something hot and gripping seems to have hold of Merlin's lungs. The feeling that he is seeing and not understanding, that there is some missing key, beats heavily about his ears, and his tongue is leaden in his mouth. Wordless he holds out his free hand, and Solomon drops the still-tidy braid into it.

The weight nearly bows Merlin to the ground; Gilgamesh's tablet clatters to the floor. Old and complicated things wind bramble-stems up around his heart, duty and prophecy and love and the blade where those three things meet, the fresh-red blood of the future coming to pass spattering across the landscape of his mind. Merlin flinches back as if it's a physical thing, lifting a hand to ward it off—

Solomon is gone.

Vaguely unsettled, Merlin collects the tablet again, tucks the braid securely into the sleeve of his robe. Both of these things are slightly more solid than stardust and wishing, but he rather thinks that makes them worse. Merlin knows what to do with gathered power like nebulae and flowers. These, he doesn't even know what they'll look like in his hands when he wakes. He turns back toward the archway through which the rest of the palace should be, and is disappointed, but not surprised, to see that David and his sheep have also vanished.

With a sigh that isn't at all sulky, really, Merlin goes outside, into the tangle of palace rooms that would probably be sensible to someone from the 9th century BC and is only a maze to him; and then he manages to find his way outside again, when he's sweet-talked the palace into being a labyrinth instead of a maze, and the courtyard is only a matter of walking onward.

In the courtyard, there are sheep.

David greets him with a wave of his belled crook. “There you are,” he says, with some gentle smile. “I wondered.”

Merlin had wondered, too. Pointedly he puts on a smile. “Out of curiosity,” he says, “what did that look like, from your end?”

“Not much,” David says. The small dark sheep is next to him, leaned against his leg like a dog asking for pats. “You touched the images which were there, and then you were still for a while. It was a little boring, and the sheep were here.” He shrugs, unapologetic. “Is all well?”

Well, at least he hadn't seen Merlin disappear or something _really_ unsettling like that. “Yep!” Merlin agrees. “Got everything I need. Thank you.” Thank you for allowing the trespass; thank you for telling your story; thank you for the weird, knowing dream of your son which was apparently directed only at Merlin. Thank you, he finds, covers a lot of versatile ground when he feels like being grateful.

“And for your efforts, Merlin, the best of luck.” David inclines his head barely. “I will not wish you an easy road, but may your path be satisfying.”

Yeah. That sounds about right, honestly. Touched, Merlin sketches a more genuine bow than he has in recent memory. “I'll see myself out,” he says when he straightens. “Have a nice dream!”

Jerusalem is still there, even with the sheep inside the walls of the palace. Merlin wanders the streets with the night sky overhead, plucking at more familiar dreams, and he skirts only briefly through his own on the journey up to waking.

The tower smells strongly of incense when he's firmly seated in his own body, in his own waking reality. His head pounds faintly. There's a weight on his chest, lighter than he would expect from a stone tablet but still something that exists, nevertheless, where something did not exist before. Carefully Merlin cranes his neck up to look at it.

He finds a collection of light in the vague shape of a tablet, like a hard-light projection, and when he touches it gingerly with a fingertip it sings of respect, even for a man beneath the King of Heroes; it hums of seeing through veils and collaborating with an equal. There is somewhere in it the concept that everyone save Gilgamesh is lesser, but that's their job, so he doesn't take it personally. Enkidu is an exception. Merlin shoves the whole thing along the lines of magic that skate between worlds, holding his focus still on the rest of Romani's coalescing Spirit Origin.

The tablet goes, fast and magnetic, like being drawn to something much larger and much stronger. Good. That which is in the coffin is very solid, then.

His tower still smells of incense. Merlin sits up, pushing himself back to lean against the wall, and carefully shakes the contents of his sleeve out into his lap. He's expecting something like the results of the tablet, a hologram or a soft, puffy cloud of white light and emotions. What he _gets_ is a braid, fluffing very gently where it was severed from the boy who wore it.

Merlin stares at this for a long time. In his lap, against the pure snow-white of his robe, it looks almost creamy, warm where snow has an undertone of icy blue. It's too real to be real.

Gingerly, he prods it with a fingertip.

Nothing.

Does he even want to know? Right now, the survey says no. He knows its provenance, and if it behaves as much like magic as he expects it to, then all will be well, and he won't _have_ to worry about it. Maybe, even, the fact that these impressions have this shape is a good sign, something to say how very much of Solomon is in them.

Less hesitantly now, Merlin picks up the braid and sinks his fingers into it, between the strands, and magic curls around his hands in response. He relaxes. “There you are,” he says to it, pleased with the familiarity over the mystery, and he sends it after the tablet, and that should be everything and everyone, shouldn't it?

Still, the scent of incense lingers strongly. “I didn't invite you,” Merlin says, despite the fact he blatantly did. Well— he invited the idea of Romani and Solomon as a passer-through, not as a guest. All the signs of him should be tidied neatly away into Klein Coffin 4, carefully locked in Chaldea's control room under Da Vinci's sleepless, watchful eyes.

Frankincense.

Merlin groans and goes to find his computer among the flowers again. He may as well ask Da Vinci about the coffin's status, at this point. If he has everything he needs, as the dream of Solomon implied...

Well, if he does, then his emotional vampirism is over, and he can babysit the coffin until Romani turns up in it, and shove off the emotions in peace.


	6. mirror, mirror

**sagerose****:** hiiiii.  
**sagerose:** hey.  
**sagerose:** Da Vinci!  


She is apparently ignoring him. Merlin starts rooting through the various created functions of his flower-computer for the one that will let him project an image of himself out of _her_ computer, specifically to yell for her attention. He knows it was around here somewhere, probably.

...and it's not working any more. Merlin opens the programming in a separate screen, hanging it at about eye level, and starts picking through the intersections between computer code and artificial magical circuitry for where the problem is. This distracts him for a while; he doesn't have it all the way fixed when Da Vinci finally responds.  
  


**ldavinci:** Not so fun from that end, is it?

**sagerose:** i have no idea what you're talking about.  
  


He is, as per usual, lying.  
  


**ldavinci:** Sure, all right. What did you want?

**sagerose:** can you check on the coffin? i think it's got everything it needs from me.

**ldavinci:** One moment.  
**ldavinci:** Hm. Well, it appears stable, for a given value of stable. The scent of incense is still present. That's bothering me a little, actually.

**sagerose:** tell me.

**ldavinci:** When this began the scents were definitively Romani's, yes? Aftershave and nostalgia. And temple-incense would belong to Solomon, I suppose. What I would like to know is, what would 'complete' look like for your project, and, if this is complete, then why isn't the associated sensory feedback balanced?  
  


Merlin gets up to pace his allotted ten meters. The screens come with him; absently he closes the programming function. She has a point, and he doesn't immediately know what the answer is.  
  


**ldavinci: **Merlin?

**sagerose:** thinking, haha.

**ldavinci:** Don't hurt yourself.

**sagerose:** rude! as if i've never heard that one before.  
**sagerose: **really, though, you have a point.  
**sagerose:** well, first, see if you can pick up a spirit origin signature. you might have to do some analysis to clear some of the noise out. 

**ldavinci:** Understood. Give me a few moments.  
  


Merlin paces some more. He's missing something, and he's reminded of the dream he is so freshly come from. _You have everything you need, Grand Caster_. Was he hoping too hard for it, or was there something true there?

He has not prophesied for a long time. Not on purpose, anyway. He's over prophecies. But: he's Grand Caster, or close enough to it.

All told, there are maybe three options for what that interaction had been. David hadn't seen it, which rules out David as the source. Either Merlin had been subconsciously controlling the dream to what he expected and hoped for; or he had run into the future while he was trying to avoid it, and it had spoken to him; or something _else_ had spoken through. Solomon himself? The Phantom Spirit they're looking for? The divinity of David and Solomon? A ghost, a memory so strong it had taken on a breath of life of its own?

Impossible to tell, and all the same, Merlin can't forget about it.

A chime.  
  


**ldavinci:** I can't put together a complete Spirit Origin signature with the available data.  
**ldavinci:** It's almost there, is the troubling part, but there seems to be a gap.  
**ldavinci:** I'll skip the technical details for now, but say it's like a missing stair, three-quarters of the way up.  
**ldavinci:** Without that one missing stair, the whole staircase collapses.  
**ldavinci:** Do you have ideas? Is there anyone you missed on your hunting trip?

**sagerose:** i can't think of anyone. i skimmed through everyone he'd met on the internet, everyone who taught him and remembered him. all the Chaldea staff. you, obviously. Ritsuka and Mash. David. even king Gilgamesh.  
**sagerose:** that encompasses everyone he is and was, or should! Solomon and Romani. that's the best i can do without raising the dead.

**ldavinci:** Then, what other steps? Perhaps we can patch the signature with something similar from  
  


Da Vinci's sentence ends there, cut off, like she pressed the enter key in the middle of a thought. Merlin gives her a few minutes, and then prods.  
  


**sagerose:** hey. Da Vinci! what is it?

**ldavinci: **Oh, sorry, I was just thinking.  
**ldavinci: **What about Magi*Mari?  
  


Oh. The pit drops out of Merlin's stomach.  
  


**sagerose:** you know that's me, right?

**ldavinci:** I know. Didn't Romani talk to you? I seem to remember...  
  


_You have everything you need_. **You** have everything you need.  
  


**sagerose:** he did.  
**sagerose:** hold that thought.  


Stupid, stupid, stupid. Why hadn't he made that connection— no, he knows why. Sometimes he's so good a liar he can even fool himself.

Because of course Merlin has something to offer there. He's the one with an archive of messages sitting in Magi*Mari's inbox; he's the one Doctor Roman had confided in about his fears, there at the end of the world; he's the one who had been kind of half-heartedly trying to forget all of the above, given that the assumed name and false pretenses were three-fifths of a betrayal.

Da Vinci pings him again and Merlin closes the messenger without looking at the words.

He really doesn't want to look at his own relationship to Romani Archaman, such as it is. Why doesn't he want to look at it? Well, it's not like there's anything _true_ there, just a bunch of lies and all the masses of emotion and attachment of everyone _else's_ that Merlin's already filtered through.

But... what Romani had trusted to him was true.

_Tell them the truth_, Merlin had told him, leaving off even the standard hallmarks of cute speech. No stars, no hearts, no put-on affection, just _tell them the truth_, coming from the great liar. He'd been sure that the staff of Chaldea, especially Ritsuka, wouldn't reject Solomon out of hand – Da Vinci was definitely not a danger zone, and had probably honestly already figured some things out. With that knowledge, perhaps an alternative solution could have been found.

No use wishing, though.

Merlin vacillates between his own desire for avoidance and the knowledge of the time pressure on this task. He doesn't want to. He doesn't necessarily have to go any further. He'd only have gotten Da Vinci's hopes up, really, and she's old and accustomed to many feelings. She probably won't want to talk to Merlin for a while, but that's fine, he shouldn't be talking to her very much anyway. Merlin can keep looking for something else to patch in that hole in the Spirit Origin, and possibly not find anything, and then all that Romani Archaman was will melt away like dew in the summer sun, as his probable phantom spirit manifests and vanishes again, rings cast to the sky and the cruelest of peaceful smiles on his face—

When they bring him back, Merlin decides, he is going to inform that man precisely how much he hates him. With careful economy of motion Merlin opens up Magi*Mari's direct message log, all the way back to the beginning. How had it started? There— he'd had the site first, calculated for a lot of cuteness and sparkles and just a little edge, and he'd scattered the advertisements into Romani's free time like breadcrumbs.

What had Merlin wanted, back then? Just to know, to understand – to have some concept of the person King Solomon had turned himself into. Maybe he'd had the fires beating heat-roar at the edge of his clairvoyant seeing for a few months. Maybe this would be something to reach along later. It was something that couldn't hurt.

Idols don't have a lot of one-on-one, genuine personal engagement with their fans. It's all carefully calculated personas, just enough to make each and every fan think he has a chance, never enough to be construed as a promise. Merlin had set all that aside to make contact himself, thanking Romani for correcting a point of trivia before he could get to it– it wasn't cute to tell people they were wrong, after all!

He'd told Romani to keep their private correspondence a secret from the rest of the forum, but thanked him for his efforts. Eventually Romani picked up some moderation work just by virtue of being there, consistently, and as Merlin didn't have an actual management team, there was no one who could tell him this was an inappropriate way to hire staff.

And they'd talked. Merlin had stayed at the remove of Magi*Mari, but Romani had talked, and Merlin hadn't dissuaded him.

He'd thought it would be obvious, once Chaldea's nebulous existence amid the incineration of humanity set in. That Magi*Mari couldn't possibly be _real_, not in the way she was presented. Romani hadn't asked.

And they had kept talking.

Merlin scrolls carefully through messages, watching the progression in Romani from polite distance to stripped-down emotion to something real and almost-frantic, everything from Orleans onward. In retrospect it's uncomfortable to read Romani's bare heart in the ascetic lines of 12-point arial font. He's not sure he can take anything like he needs out of a message log anyway.

Which leaves his own mind, his own dreams. As a rule, Merlin only really stops through those as a waypoint before launching into everyone else's, leaves one or two footprints in the sand and mud before vanishing again.

Now he doesn't have the option.

He's definitely sulking as he settles himself down to sleep, and it takes longer than it usually does for him to find that carefully shaped unconsciousness.

Merlin never dreams the tower in Avalon. When he wakes in the tower, it's always true flesh, fortunately or unfortunately. Instead the basest landscape of his dreams is Artoria’s England, lush and green against grey or blue skies. Always there are castles; usually there are nights. He's often vaguely resentful that he can't have ancient libraries or vast starscapes without having to consciously create them, that in this deepest unconscious state he is still, somehow, looking over Artoria and her knights, even when all is over and untouchable by modern hands. The resent lingers twice as strong today, biting sharp at the back of his throat. Here he is, wading through a history of attachments and mistakes, just for a man who Merlin has every intention never to see again as soon as everything is fixed. Who, while _technically dead_, is having the vast temerity to somehow make Merlin have some sort of hideous, lingering emotion, created by the amalgam of everyone else's hopes and dreams and latching claws into his spirit.

He can't even bring himself to be surprised that he's found himself a pasture full of sheep, in his own dream.

Merlin pulls up his hood against a light drizzle, spitefully opens the gate on the pasture to loose them all, and trudges into town to figure out how to convince his own subconscious to yield to him. Behind him the sheep baa nervously with the terror of freedom.

Halfway into the very familiar town, Merlin realizes one of the sheep has followed him. It's small and dark, proportioned like an adult but not nearly the size of one, and if he last saw it in David's dream he's going to be very annoyed. He looks down at it; it looks up at him. No understanding is exchanged.

“You know what,” Merlin says. “Fine.”

He knows this town well. It resists changing – he paints the roofs green and carpets the streets with flowers, and shades of people pay him no heed, and the paths don't change. When he tries to shift a building to Babylonian style, or to move the further-off hill closer, nothing happens, only the faint jangling of tense nerves. If he was about to psychoanalyze himself, it's probably about how a part of him is and will always be stuck on this moment, on the choice made then, on what he did and didn't do. 

Stewing in resentment and the drizzling rain, Merlin treks up to the stone that holds the sword to be drawn by the king of England.

There's a mass of interchangeable shades hovering nearby; but the space around the stone and sword is clear, save for one person. The young Artoria has her hands on Caliburn's hilt. Merlin already knows how the dream goes, how this went when it was true – he pauses time, shows Artoria what's to come, stretches out the future of England and Camelot around them. Most of all he shows her how it ends, Camlann painting the air overhead in blood and fire. “Will you choose this future, Artoria, even knowing this?” he had asked her.

She had put her hand on his, and smiled, and told him he was cheating, to show her only the end. “Show me the people,” she said, and, “show me the knights at my side,” and Merlin had. 

Arthur had watched everything he laid before her, unblinking, and nodded, and she had set her hand to Caliburn's hilt again. “The path is worth it,” she had said then, even as she says in Merlin's dreams. “The smiles on the faces of the people are worth it; my knights will be worth it. This will not be a mistake.”

“You can't be your own person, any more,” he warns her. The present Merlin leans on a staff pulled out of the air to watch his shade. “A king isn't really human. He can't be. He is an idea, an aspiration. Something larger than life. You'll belong to your people, Artoria. Arthur. Everything to everyone, for good and ill. That’s the price you’ll pay. Are you sure?”

Even as a youth, she regards him with a faintly quizzical look. “I'm not sure,” she says. “But I'm choosing this path, so I will be sure. Thank you for trying to spare me, Merlin. Can I ask one more favor of you?”

“You can always ask,” Merlin says then.

“I want to forget this,” she says. “I want to know I chose, but I don't want to know what's coming. That's too great a burden for any man, and I want... I want to be able to love my people, and not always be looking forward. Is that all right?”

In the past dream, Merlin smiles gently; the present Merlin makes an irritable face as he feels his throat closing. It's never easier, not really.

“Of course,” Merlin says, and he leans forward and presses a kiss to her forehead, infinitely paternal for the bare space of a moment. There's a twist of magic as he blurs the last several minutes. “There. Now draw the sword— Arthur— my king—!”

The sword slides clean of stone with barely the force of a thought, and the dream eases around them all. People gone, sword gone, Artoria gone. What remains is this: Merlin, and a sheep, and Merlin, smiling at himself. “Liar,” the young Merlin says to the new, without any heat. A comment, not a judgment.

“I know,” Merlin says to his dream, wearily. “Hey, can you show me where I keep the feelings about Romani? I know they're in here somewhere.”

His younger self, the dream of who he had been then, gives Merlin an unimpressed look. “You mean the ones you swear you're not having, right?”

“Yep, those,” Merlin says easily. It's so nice he can agree with himself. “The hypothetical ones.”

Dream-Merlin smiles at him, sunny and cheerful. The expression is exactly as annoying as Merlin always hopes it will be to other people. “Oh, yes, I know where you've been shoving those. Let's go.”

The sheep comes with them. Dream-Merlin eyes it warily, but doesn't say anything about it, and the two Merlins fall into step. The world changes around them – hills – forests – finally, a cavern filled with crystal, unremarkable from the entrance, but glowing within. No lantern or torch is needed here, when the very stones shine blue and violet all throughout. Their footsteps splash faintly in lapping water, which rises to Merlin's ankles as they go on through. The sheep behind them makes a mildly distressed sound, but when Merlin glances back for it, it's still following – it's just opted to pick its way carefully from rock to rock rather than splash through the water like them.

“So,” Merlin says conversationally, “why here?”

His dream-self, who's growing rather more fey and feral around the edges, eyes Merlin sidelong. “Sometimes I wonder if that's really healthy for us,” he says. “It's here because that's where you put it.”

“Yes, but why did I put it here?” Merlin scowls vaguely at the glowing ceiling, opting to ignore the remark about health or lack thereof. It doesn't look quite so much like a raw cave any more, rather like someone has carved and shaped it, hollowed it out for living in.

The feyer Merlin takes him by the shoulders, shakes him once to make Merlin look at him. His eyes are slit-pupiled and inhuman for this moment. “Because it's dangerous,” he says. “Because you've said to yourself that feelings like this aren't to be cultivated. So you've put them where you know the danger was. Not that of Camelot– yours.” Merlin lets go of himself, flings his hands up, and proceeds deeper. “You know it's not the same, but you're the one doing the filing, I'm just indexing.”

“I don't like the eyes,” Merlin calls after him, still vaguely trailing deep into the lake-grotto.

“It's this or horns,” dream-Merlin says back over his shoulder, with a crude gesture.

Merlin looks down at the sheep, which has picked its way up to stand just beside him, and is now looking up at him as quizzically as a sheep-face can. “That's just trite,” he tells the sheep, as if it cares about his opinions on incubus couture. “Shouldn't you be in someone else's dream?”

It baas very quietly, and starts to nibble on the edge of his robe.

“Okay, okay,” Merlin says, and keeps on after the dream of himself. “Leave that alone.” His thoughts skip through the idea that he really should be concerned about this very literal representation of hostility to himself, but— nah, it's fine. Merlin's fine. He's got a totally normal amount of regret shoved away down here somewhere, and that's all this is.

He catches up to himself in an offshoot room decorated like a boudoir. “_Really_,” Merlin says, picking at the shifting curtains. “This isn't even— I didn't even—”

“Yes?” The dream of himself flops onto the central bed, something more like a cushioned geode than a standard bed, a crackling, shining nest of a thing cushioned with velvet and down. “What didn't you even?”

Merlin can't make the words in his own damned mind. He bites his tongue over them, and the salt-taste-scent of blood wells up while he fumes impotently at himself. Everything and anything he could say will rip him bare. If he says the feelings he's been quashing regarding Romani aren't like this— well, he and Viviane, they'd hardly been _romance_, right? They'd had a fling. It had been a pretty great fling, all things considered, and the sex had been literally inhuman, and they'd learned all kinds of things from each other, but Merlin hadn't been cut to the heart-quick when she tried to kill him.

Anyway, he could see where she was coming from, with that.

So either he admits he knows the stuff about Romani doesn't belong here because those feelings are heart-first, or he admits that maybe there _had_ been some tender feelings about Viviane somewhere buried, or he decides that he subconsciously expects Romani to try to murder him. Or he just punches himself in the face, which is starting to look like the more appealing option, honestly.

The sheep starts chewing on the filmy curtains, which is the most helpful thing any dream construct has done all month.

Merlin lets his breath out, sighing deeply, resignedly. “My filing system really isn't very consistent, is it?” he says through the teeth of a grin, and starts rattling vaguely around the room under the watchful eyes of a mystery sheep and his younger self. A crystal in the corner unfolds into a laptop, from which Merlin drags out most of the early days of their correspondence. Truth is here, and the way he understands Solomon’s choice to become human and head-blind, the sympathy of one prisoner to another. The fragile sense of holding something half-formed, still growing— something that he could close his fingers and crush.

The dream of himself wordlessly hands him a fistful of pillow-down, with some errant threads of blue velvet stuck in it. Merlin snatches it from him and tries not to look too peeved about the whole affair. In his own hands the down becomes light, spangled through with the darkness between stars. Here is the bare heart that was shown to him: here is Merlin's realization that he _knows_ this man, and couldn't say whether it's Doctor Roman or King Solomon that he knows, only that it is the truth of this person that is being shown to him, and Merlin might well be the only one who sees the entire picture. It's an enormous thing for such little light, and the whole concept of it sticks in his throat, catches in his lungs.

How could he possibly have forgotten his own observations as key part to fill in the Spirit Origin? Only the very best, industrial-grade denial, of course.

Merlin has his arms full of those stingingly bare things and is hunting the rest – it's not complete, it isn't – when the sheep hacks and coughs, and finally spits up a lump of sodden fabric, chewed and torn and soaked through with sheep... liquids.

“...is that for me,” Merlin says blankly, and wonders why he's like this.

The sheep steps away from it, which Merlin will take to mean that the thing is for him. Gingerly he stoops and picks it up, and finds for several moments the unenviable texture of spit-soaked silk before it turns to something softer and lighter, emotions that twine around Merlin's fingertips. Here's his determination, then. Here's all the reasons he watched that final battle instead of attending, recording and witnessing instead of himself fighting. He knew what was going to happen, and how humanity would be preserved, and he hoped it might turn out with fewer deaths, and he planned like it wouldn't.

Merlin himself grieved, didn't he? Maybe not – much. Something in passing. The note of a thing that had happened, a thing that had ended. He told himself that if he put it all back together it wouldn't matter so much, but it always matters, when people die. A death is still a death, even if it's undone later. Life never comes cheap.

With this whole thing in his hands it looks fuller, more complete: a soft cloud of light and dark, sparkle and tarnish, hovering between peach and snow. Merlin flops down into the bed next to himself and stretches out on his back to hold the cloud overhead, twisting it this way and that, watching the way the crystal-light spatters off it.

A third of his hands reaches over to tap at one of the lighter parts. His nails are sharper than Merlin's. “Tell me you understand,” the other him says, uncharacteristically serious. “Tell me we actually know what's going on here.”

“I know,” Merlin says easily, staring through light and crystal. “I just can't name it. Once it's all done, I'm going to put it away, and wait for it to wither. Just because I know doesn't mean I have to swallow it whole.”

“We are really not okay, are we,” the other him says. He's not asking for an answer. A careful pluck and reach spins the cloud in Merlin's hands, over and over, evening the textures out to something rounder. “That's fine. As long as we know this is true, right here and now. That's what matters. This perception, this feeling. If it's true, then this will work.”

Merlin doesn't deign to acknowledge the first part, instead sinks his fingers carefully into the depths of the feelings and perceptions. The cloud stops spinning and emotions wash up Merlin's arms, prickling a warm pain all down the length of each blood vessel till they reach his heart and clench, seizing.

Wherever it came from, whether it's secondhand or honest, whether Merlin meant to or not, right now this is what is true: this squeezing, viciously possessive heat, this cruel tender yearning, this fierce, dragging want. Understanding like a kiss; sympathy like a bite.

He won't speak its name; but it is here, and it is real enough, and Merlin feels it.

He frees his fingers one by one from the last piece of Romani Archaman's presence in the world that he had needed, and cradles it against his chest. “Yes,” he says, to himself and the sheep. “It's true.”

Saying even that much out loud doesn't shake the internal landscape around him. It kind of feels like it should, though.

Eventually, with a long sigh, Merlin sits up, careful not to sink his touch too far into the amalgamation of emotions and understanding he's still holding. The other part of him stays sprawled on the bed. “You know the way out,” he says, waving a nearly clawed hand. “Hey, one last thing, though.”

“Hm?” Merlin steps carefully around the sheep, looks over his shoulder at the dream. “What?”

There's a flash of a grin from the geode-nest of the bed. “When's the Mage of Flowers been any good at letting things wither?”

Merlin turns away and walks out. He is not storming out. He's not even stepping any heavier than usual. He's just leaving, _right now_.

It turns out the sheep comes with him, up along the waterlogged cavern-home and out to a shore. It follows him even into the woods, even as Merlin tugs at the fabric of the dream to shape it into something closer to where he began. In a fit of extreme graciousness, he's shaping their path back to where he began, to the sheep pasture. Trees bend and settle; grass sprouts in fits and starts as pastoral town approaches.

None of the other sheep have left through the gate Merlin opened for them, only huddled around it nervously. Even this barrier, the one not quite seen, is too much for them. “There you go,” Merlin says, looking over and down at the sheep. “Home, sweet home.”

The sheep regards him placidly, and makes no move to return to its cohorts. He notes again that it's smaller than they are, and darker – the figurative and literal black sheep.

“You're symbolic of something, aren't you,” Merlin tells it with some heavy annoyance, when some few moments have passed with no movement but continued nervous baaing from the pasture. “Could you stop?”

It bends its head to chew on some of the presented grass, as if to say if it's symbolic of anything, it's hunger. Merlin watches this, too, and derives no great cosmic wisdom from observing it. Only that this is a sheep, or a dream of a sheep, and it appears to be doing whatever sheepy things it wants, and he genuinely doesn't know whether to worry about it or not.

Finally he bends to pluck up some of the grass for himself, spins it out one-handed to grow long and golden, weaves the ends together with a thought. A kiss makes a bell for it. He nudges the sheep in the side until it looks up, and when it does Merlin drops the newly belled collar over its head. “There,” he says. “You're probably part of my dreams, and if you're not, I'll know exactly where you start causing trouble.”

The sheep eyes him with a definite air of wondering why it was disturbed, and puts its head down again.

Nothing further.

Grumbling vaguely about dream constructs that don't know what's good for them, Merlin wakes himself up. The moment he's cognizant, the very instant he's sure he can toss this bundle of dreamstuff along the thready connection to Chaldea with no danger of losing it, he does so. He doesn't want it in his hands any longer than necessary – he wants it where it's supposed to be, filling in the gaps of a Spirit Origin that isn't lost yet.

Within five minutes, the computer he left open chimes at him.  


**ldavinci: **Something just changed over here. The coffin seems balanced now.  
**ldavinci:** Let me guess. Magi*Mari?

**sagerose:** gloating does not become you, Da Vinci.

**ldavinci:** Nonsense. Beauty and genius are made to be appreciated; art becomes when it is observed.  
**ldavinci:** All of that to say, I told you so.  
  


Merlin doesn't have a clever comeback for that, which is the day's worst tragedy. He opts to ignore it instead, and run with the generally sound tactic of just moving on.  
  


**sagerose:** can you run the analysis you tried earlier? i think you should be able to resolve a complete spirit origin out of it now.

**ldavinci:** It's already running. It's taking longer than last time. For some reason, the signal-to-noise ratio is lower than it was.  
**ldavinci:** I don't suppose you can shed some light on why that might be?

**sagerose:** dreams work in mysterious ways.

**ldavinci:** Please imagine my knowing smile.  
  


He doesn't have to, honestly; all it takes is a quick look toward Chaldea and he scrapes up an image of Da Vinci wearing a serene smile, very slightly crooked, one that clearly says she knows something and will not be telling him what it is. Merlin doesn't even know why he looked in the first place. He could eyeball over to the Louvre to look at the Mona Lisa and get the same effect.

Da Vinci isn't discolored with varnish, though, so he supposes in the end she's a step ahead.  
  


**sagerose:** well?  


She doesn't answer him for a long time, long enough that Merlin tabs over to the cat memes just to keep himself from being _completely_ bored. Wait, no— _red panda memes_. Genius.  
  


**ldavinci:** Bingpot!  
**ldavinci:** Spirit Origin confirmed. It's confusing poor Laplace, but I can confirm it's a complete signature. 

**sagerose:** Laplace doesn't have to identify it, just match it. save at least three backups of the data, okay? 

**ldavinci:** Of course! I'm not completely new to data security.  
**ldavinci: **Although it's harder to write backwards on a computer, modern encryption techniques are a pleasing substitute when taken a few steps further.  
**ldavinci:** Now, I have an awkward question for you.  
**ldavinci:** What name shall I save this data under? 

**sagerose:** ...i don't know.  
**sagerose: **i collected impressions from every scrap left of him in this world, but...  
**sagerose:** would you believe, despite all that, i don't know exactly what we're going to get?

**ldavinci:** Yes.

**sagerose:** rude!!  
**sagerose:** really, though. there's a little bit of all of him there. it could be king Romani, or doctor Solomon, or anything in between. and anyway if anyone else has access to the files you should be saving it with a completely unrelated filename, just in case.

**ldavinci:** Done!  
**ldavinci:** If I receive any queries about why we have a saved Spirit Origin signature labeled Magi*Mari, I'll direct them to you.  
  


Out loud, Merlin groans, because there's no one else there to hear it and judge that Da Vinci has hit some kind of a mark. He doesn't even know what kind, just that she has a long stick and is insistent on poking him with it.  


**sagerose:** i'm delighted to help my adorable fans~ ☆♡✴✴✴

**ldavinci:** I hope you know half of your doubtless adorable symbols come through as blank boxes.

**sagerose:** i can fix that.

**ldavinci:** I'm sure you can, but I'm more amused by the idea of asking Babbage to.  
**ldavinci:** For right now, I'd rather talk about next steps.  
**ldavinci:** As a start, we scan with this Spirit Origin. I'm setting Laplace and Trismegistus to ping off anything with a 70% resemblance or greater, just to allow for a certain margin of error.  
**ldavinci:** I'd rather get false positives than miss him.

**sagerose:** good policy.  
**sagerose:** especially considering how much of this is assembled just by picking it out of people's heads. there's probably some cognitive drift in there.  
**sagerose:** if we get super desperate we can probably sprinkle in some terrible old action-adventure movies.

**ldavinci:** I'll keep the option in mind.  
**ldavinci:** So! What happens when we get a hit?  
  


Something Merlin appreciates – has appreciated, and keeps appreciating – is that Da Vinci doesn't say if. Her supreme confidence in this plan, and in Merlin's skills, is a wonderful second to Merlin's own confidence.  
  


**sagerose:** then you send Ritsuka to go get him, of course!

**ldavinci:** Is it really that simple? We spoke about the leyshift when you visited, but somehow I’d expected more trickery.  
**ldavinci:** Are you thinking the unsummon program will be able to convert spiritrons back into a body, or are you imagining Ritsuka will seal a contract and make him a Servant?

**sagerose: **i think it would be exceptionally cruel to bring him back only as a Servant, after all this. and i am inhuman, Da Vinci, but most days i try not to be cruel.  
  


There's an oddly long pause on her end of things, a stilled ellipsis on the insubstantial screen. Merlin lengthens the reach of his vision again to see her and finds no answers there, only Da Vinci with one knuckle pressed to her lips, a perfect image of thoughtfulness.  


**ldavinci:** Perhaps you have a better understanding of humans than you give yourself credit for, Merlin. 

**sagerose:** nah. i just think they're neat.

**ldavinci:** So your plan is, when his phantom spirit is located, we can confirm the Spirit Origin and use Ritsuka to get a leyshift fix on him. 

**sagerose:** i think you can probably trick the leyshift into bringing him back pretty easily.  
**sagerose:** doctor Roman used it to get to the temple of time, but nothing came back.  
**sagerose:** it might take a little work, but if you can convince the system it's just running a return leyshift for him, too, then you should have it! 

**ldavinci:** Ah! Of course. That's not impossible.  
**ldavinci:** The simplest way... yes. I can spoof the date and use the historical data, I think.  
**ldavinci:** I'll look at this. Your help wouldn't be amiss.  
**ldavinci: **If I think of something more, I'll let you know. 

**sagerose:** let me know as soon as you get a hit.  
**sagerose:** this is a one-chance only sort of a thing, you know? 

**ldavinci:** I know.  
**ldavinci:** We'll make it perfect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Referencing [this LP](https://lparchive.org/Fatestay-night/Update%2085/) for some details of Artoria and Merlin. Creative liberties taken from there.


	7. it gets stuck on your tongue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> May 2020 update: A delightful reader created art for us! _Please_ go look, it's gorgeous and full of feelings. 
> 
> https://www.deviantart.com/sterlingraven/art/Dreams-839808943

It's not like that's _it_, obviously there's more to do – Merlin scries over to Chaldea frequently just to keep an eye on things, for instance – but in some ways that's his primary contribution done. The pieces of dreams and spirit germinating in the coffin settle down, wrap around each other and make as if to put down roots. Sometimes when Merlin looks at the whole thing, he thinks he sees something, maybe even someone, but it's never more than flickers, afterimages at the corners of his eyes. Not prophecy, not clear-sight, just something that might be there someday.

Something that's remembering how to exist in the world, how to bend space around itself with the simple act of presence.

A few days pass. Da Vinci occasionally chimes in to alert Merlin that everything's still well, that she doesn't have any hits for Romani's Spirit Origin out in the wide, wide net of history yet, but that work progresses. There's less sniping and banter. Merlin informs himself sternly that he doesn't miss it, and topples into other peoples' dreams, alert chimes turned up at the highest volume next to his sleeping body.

When there are results, he will be there.

A week. Merlin finds himself aimless without the quest for pieces of Romani Archaman. Idly he pokes back into his own dreams – just the outskirts, just a little – to see if the weird sheep is still there. The bell hasn't done anything to alert him, so maybe it's simply disappeared back into the landscape of his mind.

There's no pasture and no flock of sheep, and he finds a piece of his mind like a stony, grey-washed beach, and a small dark sheep with a silent bell hopping from rock to rock like it owns the place. “Excuse me,” Merlin says, abruptly struck by the presumption. “What do you think you're doing?”

The sheep comes to the boulder nearest him, which is easily as high as Merlin's shoulder, a dark and craggy thing about of a piece with his current mood. It doesn't hesitate before scaling the entire thing as if it's part mountain goat, and inside of a few minutes it perches on top of the boulder to look down on Merlin and baa.

Merlin wonders if an antagonistic sheep is better or worse than Artoria choosing her future death. With the risk of sheep spit very near, he isn't immediately sure. “Be that way, then,” he says, and turns around and wakes himself up.

He wakes still nettled, tries to pick a fight with Da Vinci only to find that she's half-ignoring him, returning only neutral statements it's very difficult to actually war with. Merlin really does his best, and the best he gets out of her is a gentle admonishment about name-calling.

Full of spite and vinegar, Merlin wades into the comments section of some contemporary news articles. This ought to cure him, he thinks with a grim sort of determination, both of the stinging, sourceless frustration, and his increasing suspicion that he's caught more tenderness for a few specific humans – and spirits – than is really wise. Here are all the reasons humans are pointless to care about as more than characters in stories.

It doesn't cure him. Merlin's left cranky and vaguely dispirited with the whole endeavor. He paces the length of his tower-room, back and forward and back again, and finds no outlet, and the wonder of the dreams he usually wanders is somehow muted. He's watched humanity from this remove for nearly a millennium and a half, and rarely has he bored. Even this isn't quite boredom– it's something vibrating, something like a taut plucked string hiding somewhere under his skin with nowhere to go.

Da Vinci's updates keep up. Every now and then, she idly mentions that Ritsuka's been asking after him, or that Mash is missing him. Merlin is pretty sure this last has to be an outright fabrication, but...

No buts. They're not attached to him, they barely had time to get to know each other in Babylonia, and he's been as hands-off as possible since then.

Merlin sulks vaguely into his dreams again somewhere around March. He thinks. He hasn't kept a close eye on the date, measuring mostly by how the coffin breathes and how Da Vinci keeps him posted. Maybe he'll stay in his own dreams a while, figuring out the issue of that aggrieving sheep, always with one ear for the chime of the messenger to tell him plans are reaching fruition.

The sheep meets him this time, too, lifting its head from grass to come over as soon as Merlin puts his feet down on the green hill. It's bigger, Merlin thinks, though he doesn't have a great frame of reference – more like, it comes up to his thigh, and he thinks it was only just above his knee before, but he's not certain.

Below them, Merlin can see people gathered around a sword in a stone. He sighs and sits down on the grass, which puts the sheep about at head-height. It curves around to look at him sidelong, and then comes a little closer to sniff. He's expecting its breath to be terrible, he realizes as it gives him a quick once-over, but it smells nothing like a ruminant. Frankincense, he thinks, and heat, and a lingering sweetness—

The sheep placidly chews some additional grass as he scowls at it. “What do you _want_?”

It does not enlighten him. Merlin sits there feeling vaguely foolish as a green twilight overtakes the sky and the moon rises luminous, huge and round and mutinously violet.

The sword in the stone stays where it is, as do the people. Merlin suspects if he went down to them, the sun would be high again, that he would find again that same day caught in amber and waiting for him. If it's that or the sheep, he's going to settle down with the sheep, he guesses; and when he flops onto his back in the grass, the sheep lies down next to him companionably, legs tucked up under it.

Merlin stares up at the stars as his robe soaks up dew and presses it cold against his shoulders. “I could tell you about the constellations,” he says idly, “but it wouldn't mean much. The stars here are what I make them. And you're a sheep.” Historically, sheep don't care much about the pictures their shepherds tell themselves hang in the sky.

It baas softly in his ear. Merlin flinches.

“Look,” he says, and points up, rearranging distant points of light to suit himself. He lines them up golden and kingly, gestures with a sweep of his fingers. “It's Gilgamesh.” A tiny crown that might once have been the stars of the Summer Triangle makes the finishing touch.

This time the baa is slightly more contemplative.

“You're right,” Merlin tells it. “Needs more treasure, and more Enkidu. Otherwise, how can we tell it's Gilgamesh?” He weaves up some more stars, ones which don't strictly exist now, and paints pictures in galaxies for the benefit of the sheep next to him. He still doesn't think it cares; but more than once when he looks over at it, he finds that its head is tilted skyward, and the stars are reflected in its eyes.

The sheep stays there with him. Merlin lets the moon and the sun of his internal world do their thing instead of pushing them along, and he tells nonsense stories to go along with the star-pictures, and eventually dawn paints the sky over in roses.

Merlin doesn't have anywhere to be, but it's when the sun finally peeks crimson over the hazy horizon that the sheep gets up, unfolding and lazily stretching. It trots off a ways and stops.

“Leaving so soon?” Merlin pushes himself up to his elbows, only to find that the sheep has turned to look back at him. He thinks it's expectant. Either that, or he's been lying around in his own dreams so long that he's ascribing personality and wants to a simple figment that's not even a large enough part of his identity to have a voice.

It comes back to him, and then walks away again. It has a tail, he notices, half the length of its back legs, undocked. Huh. Weird. He knows just enough about sheep to be dangerous, which means he knows kept sheep don't usually have long tails.

Merlin gets up, brushes himself off and looks around. The sheep repeats its circle, coming toward him and then away again, and it occurs belatedly that it wants him to follow. Maybe now that he's spent a cycle of the night telling it stories, it's going to tell him what it wants?

Well, more likely it's just going to find some other sheep, but whatever. It's not like Merlin has anything better to do. He ambles after it, leaving the town and people and sword and stone behind him.

Down the grassy hill there are trees, woods that grow deeper and darker. Merlin hauls his staff out of thin air only to prop light amidst its ribbons, soft and desert-warm. The sheep waits for him while he does, and then keeps going – wherever their destination, it's so deep into the old growth of the forest that the branches lace together overhead to block any light at all coming through. The stones are moss-covered, the trees bigger and bigger, the forest floor a springy, fresh-smelling dirt littered with needles. No birds sing; no water runs.

It's possible Merlin should be concerned about whatever this represents, but— sometimes a dream is just a dream.

The walk is long. Finally amid trees so huge they're pillars unto themselves, so broad Merlin couldn't hope to fit his arms around more than a tenth of the trunk, the sheep leads him to a building.

A building with a _lot_ of stairs.

It's all stone, weathered but kept well, three seasons north of an abandoned temple. The steps go up its side, steep and stark, and the sheep trots up these as if there's nothing else to be done, as if it spends its life hopping up narrow stones. Merlin's come this far – he really should see what it wants, probably.

He grouses aloud about the stairs as he follows, up and up and up. His footsteps on the stone echo vaguely muted, like there's nowhere for the sound to go even though it's trying valiantly to exist. Had he seen the top of the building? Maybe. He sure can't see the forest floor, after a while, and the canopy seems forever above them. Even in a dream Merlin's panting before he even sees the top.

Without some idea of sun or moon, he has no sense of time to match. All he has is _eventually_: eventually the stairs end, eventually there is a broad flat landing, eventually he finds where the sheep is leading him. All rough-hewn stone, there is a dais, and an altar, and a knife of obsidian, and the sheep hops itself up on the altar like it knows what it's about and looks pointedly at the knife, and above the dark canopy of the trees rustles faintly. Any sound here would be swallowed up forever, Merlin thinks dazedly; any blood spilt would only grow the forest deeper, and darker, and quieter. The light of his staff doesn't reach as far, and where it does it shows stains on the darkest of the stones.

He looks at the sheep.

The sheep looks at him, and then looks at the knife again.

“You know what,” Merlin says, abruptly fed up, “no.”

He knows sacrifice when he sees it; he has some vague inkling that he's supposed to carve some part of himself out here, in the places he never sees, never touches. He's having none of it.

“Thank you,” he adds, ungraciously, “but no.”

He doesn't even quite know what he's rejecting – the symbolism isn't that clear, except that lambs are usually the innocent and have a heavy-handed set of additional connotations beside. But this is _nonsense_, is what it is, and he isn't going to paint the stars for a dumb animal and then kill it after, even if it's heavily implied that this is the way of things. The temple isn't in disrepair, after all. Life, and death, have been here before.

There’s nothing else to say on the topic. Merlin turns around and goes back down the stairs, and if the narrow steps were any more forgiving he'd be stomping all the way. It takes just as much of forever to get back to the ground.

The woods aren’t the same, when he finds them again: he’s in a different place entirely, the path half-overgrown, everything dense and dark and full of teeming growth, only the quiet to say it might be the place he was first. Merlin snarls wordlessly at all of this and just keeps walking, refusing to look back toward the temple of nonsense. Eventually he'll find where he started, as long as he doesn't turn.

Some time into this stomping, there are two sounds behind him – something light-stepping, contrast to Merlin’s footfalls, then the faintest chime of a bell. It's never sounded before, but that doesn't stop Merlin from knowing the sound of a bell he made himself.

He pauses where he is, between a tree and a fern curling with new branches, and doesn't look back.

The sheep comes up beside him and leans its shoulder heavily against his thigh. It has horns now, four of them – two curling, two spiked up – but it looks like the same sheep, regardless, and wears the same bell. “That's cute,” Merlin says, unimpressed. “What are you playing at?”

It doesn't find a voice to tell him, but it walks ahead of him. Merlin sighs deeply, and follows it out, and eventually the canopy turns to morning, and he can breathe without a weight in his chest.

Out here, he can hear something loud, rattling the sky in search of his attention. It couldn't reach into the forest, whatever it is—

Belatedly Merlin recognizes an instant message chime, repeated over and over again, as if someone's trying to get his attention. “Don't make trouble,” he informs the sheep sternly, and he doesn't have time to deal with its follies, doesn't bother to stop and see what it does – he's launching himself into movement, staff curling into light up his sleeves as he wakes himself up.  


**ldavinci:** Merlin.  
**ldavinci:** Merlin.  
**ldavinci: **MERLIN.

**ldavinci sent file: reveille.mp4**

**ldavinci:** ...No, I can't make it autoplay from here. Merlin, answer your messages!  
**ldavinci:** We have a hit. It's him. 96% Spirit Origin match.  
**ldavinci:** Jerusalem, 9th century BC.  
**ldavinci:** And it's not April yet, by the way.  
**ldavinci:** But I will graciously accept the early birthday present.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's that for this one! I'm happy to talk about my creative choices, including which parts of Fate/ canon I have butchered or ignored, but this is a done work and not getting further revised despite inaccuracy. A few notes:
> 
>   * chapter title from Florence & The Machine, "Hardest of Hearts" - "you have love in your body and you can't get it out, it gets stuck on your tongue, won't come out of your mouth"
>   * Sheep referenced is a [Jacob sheep](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_sheep) \- the story that their bloodline traces back to the specific sheep mentioned in the Bible is probably apocryphal, but I love the look of them.
>   * Cookies for spotting Parks & Rec and Brooklyn 99 references.
>   * I know a lot more about CSS than when I started.
>   * A man who constantly disavows something is a bad liar.


End file.
